RE: My view on the future of Steemit and suggestions how we can improve as a community.
The first question should be possible for the bot owners to configure their bots in a way that they accept a certain amount of $ a week per person or whatever. I'm sure bot owners know how they could configure that.
Normally yes, the trending page could be reached without bots. But these bots are here now and people use them to hit the trending page. Basically, you don't have a shot at reaching the trending page unless you get enough upvotes to pass the power of upvote bots, which can be crazy high. For a post to get 300$+ in rewards, it would need some whale votes and how many times did we see a post reach the trending page unless it was written by a whale anyway?
There is plenty to discuss, even though some people say this topic is already dead. But a topic can't be dead unless it's solved, these problems are not solved yet at all.
Bot owners can do it, but other question - why would they? There are bot owners who are thinking the best of the community and bot owners who just want to maximize their profits. Even if we can get a bunch of bot operators to run their bots more ethically, I'm quite sure there will just pop up more options which people will use.
And about the trending page, you are pretty much right. I'm hoping more people will just skip the trending page and start finding good content on their own, but the trending page is easy and attractive to many users :)