I have always been pro bot and do not see bots as the problem. I don't think human based curation can scale realistically because human attention is extremely scarce. If curating paid a lot more then perhaps it could scale but even then the incentive would be to automate it because again human attention is very scarce. So I don't see a way around bots eventually doing the curating. The hope is that the bots becoming increasingly better at it, at least to me, because if not then there is a problem.

The other hope is perhaps content production and curation will both mostly be done by bots with human beings having less of a role in these activities but even if this is the case there has to be enough diversification in the ecosystem that humans can find something better to do. Right now it seems as if the only thing you can do with Steem is blog or curate content which is extremely limited because there is a lot more to human interaction than that.

I totally understand having to withdraw. I've had to do that in the past or I would have 50,000+ Steem Power right now. People have bills to pay though and so people power down as they need to. My point here is that if people could earn doing more than just blogging and curating then maybe more people would have less reason to power down.