I would not blame it all on the bots (well, as a developer I like the easy way how algorithms can interact with Steem), but rather on the economic model that facilitates the usage of bots, and bid bots in particular.
By the way, Steemit is not as decentralized as you think. There could be a very simple and straightforward change to Steemit that would take away a huge amount of power from bid bots: Simply exclude bot votes from the trending and hot sections. This is really not rocket science, I do it myself on a daily basis to filter bot promoted posts :-D.
Moreover, this could actually be done on the front-end side without the need of a hard fork. This decision can be made by the Steemit company without consensus because they run the Steemit front-end and the corresponding full node.
How do you filter out bot-promoted posts from your feed? I'd love to know.
Also, Stinc depends on the whales, and if they unilaterally cut the ROI of whales by axing bots, they will be looking for other work.
My bot @trufflepig does it by blacklisting all bid bots and vote selling services and monitoring all transactions to these services. Currently he publishes a top list of posts each day that were not promoted by bid bots. Maybe I'll turn him into a service that you can call him on demand for a top list for a tag of your choice.
I reckon that would be a popular service. Probably more effective at curtailing bidbots than any other device I can think of that is deployable presently.
Thanks!
Or we could develop better UI/UX implementations that focus on alternative metrics and have dedicated sub-communities to filter content among these groups. Sure, removing accounts using a blacklist can work, but if we subdivide the work load among smaller groups of people interested in similar things, active groups should thrive and inactive groups will simply fall apart. At the moment Steemit feels like a single giant mess with a lot of misclassified articles due to the ineffective tagging system.
Fortunately, @jga has started this journey already hosting a custom frontend on github:
https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@jga/introducing-custom-feed-filter-the-authors-and-posts-that-you-want-to-read