Thanks @benjojo,

I wholeheartedly agree that there are serious problems on this platform and commend you for seeking a viable solutions. I do have a bit of commentary to add and do contend with one aspect. I recently commented on another users post addressing unhelpful bots (from the community perspective) / automation endemic to the platform. Upvote bots and vote farming (buying upvotes with the intent of distributing the SBD of the post rewards as a system) are two sides of the same coin I believe. My colleagues and I have been fighting on the latter front through the @steemflagrewards program.

I have heard various permutations of arguments defending the use of bots. Witnesses like @jerrybanfield have expressed intent to fork suck a mechanism into Steem which I believe would be a dire mistake.

I know some of my views may be a bit on the fringe and perhaps are tangential to your post but I ask that you hear me out and evaluate what you believe is relevant.

I think one of the deciding factors on whether a automation or bots is good depends on the motive of the user and whether they consider the wider scope of impact. I fear many do not take this sort of thing into consideration when it comes to profit.
My reasoning for not desiring bid bots in the system is it has a tendency to put other users at a disadvantage especially considering when bid amounts exceed the weight of the bots upvote. Also, I consider the impact these services have on curation. If we have high powered bid bots that can easily bring a sub par post to trending, isn't this counter to the efforts humans are putting in towards manual curation of quality.
One ideal that I hope would be realized on Steem is that of users having an equal voice where it doesn't matter if you are a plankton or a whale that if you bring quality content that you will receive a fair reward. I think bid bots get in the way of this becoming a reality because the one with the deeper pockets can just buy upvotes irrespective of the quality of the post.
On the flip side, automated solutions can and have been used for good. They can be used to filter content by criteria, autofollow mutual follows, and facilitate comment contests among other things

Ok, to explain on the point I believe your plan may want to be reconsidered. That point is the numeric reputation system. The reason I say this is I know that reputation can and has been bough on this platform. It is not necessarily meritocratic and that is why I believe using it as a metric is problematic.

I wholeheartedly agree that competency should be the determining factor. Perhaps, take subject matter experts in respective tags and assign the duty of confirming the veracity and quality of posts that pertain to their knowledge.

I am struggling to find the exact piece of literature but I vaguely recall something that may have been by Twain that essentially expressed that in writing at least, it is good to have experience with a topic. For instance, if a writer has experience as a fur trader ( I think that was the example used) that they would be able to more vividly describe the experience. In like fashion, a curation experienced in something will be able to identity content that is true to the nature of what is being described.

Some tags are more general than others but to those that have any degree of specificity in an area of experience or potentially technical in nature. It would help to have a curator that had experience in the respective tag(s). Therefore, I believe identifying curation specialist for at least popular tags would be a great idea.

I hope we can work together to help clean this place up. I've taken a hard stance on a lot of issues and believe I have not succumb to greed but it is indeed disheartening to see those that have employed deceptive methods motivating by greed to be the ones to get ahead.