Thank you for your response. I do remember that post from a while back. I didn't respond at the time because I was new to Steem, just starting to experiment with my bidding bot strategies, and not at all ready to weigh in on the different levels of arguments.

I am not in favor of protocol changes to resolve social problems in the ecosystem. I think that establishing solutions without implementing a hard fork is better for the long-term health of the ecosystem.

Trending and Hot pages are not protocol level. That means that one of your suggestions (stripping paid votes out of the formulas for trending/hot) would resolve most of the demand problem. The financial risk implications would still remain, but if the bots aren't required to get post visibility then the virtually unlimited demand would diminish and the problem would mostly disappear.

Since Steemit is fully focused on SMTs and doesn't give a damn about problems that they believe will self-resolve with the launch of SMTs, maybe calling on the other groups that provide front-end interfaces to fork the Condenser and rebuild the hot/trending calculations is more practical than calling on the bot owners to change their stripes.

You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.