Thanks for this explanation, and the comparisons of possible approaches.

As a blogger/content creator and relative newbie, the thing that keeps poking at my mind is the whole bot vs human imbalance. Yes, bots definitely have their place... whether they are utilities like @cheetah or something else. But as a writer I look at this and see that my post has (for example) 200 votes and 23 views. Now, I realize this is more a psychological thing than a functional one... but I create content for people to enjoy it, interact with it, learn from it or whatever. A bot ping doesn't really tell me anything because most bots are not "smart." They can tell the difference between "War & Peace" and a poorly constructed joke.

Maybe that has little impact in the short term, but in the long term I scratch my head and wonder "why should I BOTHER" to create something worthwhile. OK, so "worthwhile" may be subjective, but in the long term a potential new user/investor is going to see some old content and base their decision to join/not join Steemit on whether they are looking at something "good" or a pile of garbage.

Well, that kind of curation (pushing quality content to highest visibility) requires humans, not bots... which is a longwinded way of asking "what about addressing the relative weight/import of a bot upvote vs. an upvote by a real human who looked at a piece of content, decided "this is good," upvoted and even left a comment, stimulating discussion. Those two surely don't have the same "value," in the greater scheme of things?