@meno You write very well. I read every word. I struggled with huge number of comments below though. Congrats to you for replying to so many of them!
I would like to add to of my impressions:
Bots were good in the early days to encourage posters. Now we no longer need upvoting bots. There are enough humans to do the job. Maybe keep the anti-spam and anti plagarism bots. Otherwise, the upvoting bots are just miliking the reward pool for reasons not related to altruism.
Second comment is on whales. I agree that whales should act in their own collective best interest by upvoting qualtiy content. However if 99% do that, 1% can just get away with miliking the system. I can imagine that new potential whales are joining steemit thinking that they can be part of the 1% then 10%..... We need curators to rate the curators!
Exactly, you summarized it perfectly... if only 1 whale decides to not participate then the solution could not be implemented. It might be extremely difficult for all of them to sit down and agree on this, its not secret that they are not all friends, but I'm not ready to say it can't be done.
Even in politics sometimes our opposing parties manage to pass the almost unicornian bipartisan bills, with the obvious intention of helping the country. I would like to believe that we can do the same with Steemit.
Thank you for adding your two cents, I feel like this post has become a little repository for collective wisdom. cheers @meno