Thanks for the post. I think healthy, data driven criticism is great.

If steemit wants to distribute the wealth, it needs to increase discovery capabilities for good content, regardless of steem power. It needs to deprioritize certain factors that cause whales to dominate the trending page.

The bots are just a quick, dirty, and in my opinion, bad solution to a discovery problem. Steemit has the ability to open up the long tail for bloggers. A small audience can support the content they like. Unfortunately, today, it just rewards the few "hits" which are the whales and investors in the platform.