People have the right to place whatever value they want on a post and adjust it down if they feel it's overvalued

This notion gets gets thrown around a lot. But then the valuation gets extremely distorted because:

The viewer is expected to look at the value of the post and reconcile that with the fact the votes were paid for.

The expectation is to tread lightly around the valuation of their bids, because it's the viewers responsibility to help prop up an industry with sunk costs, that happens to be helping to prop up the price of STEEM at the moment. How does this not break down over time?

The fork happened and downvotes are plentiful, the only party that needs to adjust now are the bots themselves. If they cannot adjust, they deserve to go the way of the dodo. I'm not going to adjust my behavior to help prop them up, because I know long term that isn't good for STEEM either.

I'm going to look at a post, value it, and downvote it if I feel it's over-rewarded. It just so happens that the most expensive stuff on trending happens to be mostly put there by bots. I am for sure NOT going to look at who voted it and say to myself, "oh this was a promotion bot, hands off".

Downvoting either exists to restore proportionality to rewards or it doesn't. The front ends should stop sitting on their hands in terms of providing solutions for self promotion. They are leaving potentially a lot of money on the table by not doing it, so I suspect they also fear the reprisal of this nascent vote buying industry, that's now so vital to the survival of STEEM, as we are led to believe.