I fully empathise...

You know that I stopped using Smartsteem to buy votes a few weeks ago mostly because of your articles on the matter. Being part of the long-term growth and health of this platform, to me, now, is totally worth giving up the benefits of buying votes.

But I also don't have children. And I don't spend as much time as you do creating content specifically for Steemit (although more and more, I'm starting to throw everything I do at it ;P).

Something you could do as a middle-ground, perhaps, is use the bot systems (or smartsteem) on specific posts only, and only do it once a week? ...

Like, for example, you could be darkly poetic by using bots to promote only posts that talk about this very issue, encouraging people not to use bidbots all the time and encourage them to join communities and grow organically.

And have a paragraph at the bottom of each post like this, explaining why you're using a bot for that post. (lol... It'll certainly generate controversy, which is always good).