After puzzling over the whole steemit platform for some time, my own very basic conclusion is every user just needs to put into it what they are happy with doing - do you want to create amazing blog posts and get a bit of a bonus with the potential payout - or just earn a little from basic posts and using the wide variety of tools to help increase the value of each and bump it by upvoting and commenting to gain curation rewards. Whatever way you want to go about it, the bots seem to be part and parcel of the platform.