I'm holding out hope that the free market aspect of Steemit will ultimately balance all of this out. Sooner or later, the spammers will realize that there's very little return for the effort they're putting in and move on. All it should take is for users to become more selective about what they choose to upvote and that will help starve the spammers & bots into looking for easier pickings.

I also can't help but think that corrections to the changes made in HF19 that led to a lot of this are already being worked on.

Someone also pointed out to me a while ago, Steemit is still in Beta testing.

They're working the bugs out.