You're welcome and thank you too for your comprehensive review. As @freedomshift has mentioned, these are just wishful thinking but who knows. Wishes do come true… 😊

For the self upvote, I would honestly tell the commenter to be more genuine next time and not exploit the copy/paste spam. I told that to the commenter I was referring on my post.

When cicisaja told me about eSteem, I also liked the idea so I tried it. But just like you, I kept getting an error like that. I can't even schedule a post with an error of something like "can't get schedule" so I stopped.

For the bid bots, try to open a post on the trending page and look at the author's wallet. You will notice at least one transfer (others have several transfers) of large amount of either Steem or SBD to accounts that offer bid bot services. There was once I tried to compute how much the account paid versus the payout of the trending article. It was not really that much. The difference was around $5.00 though at least that exposed the author and the post through the trending page.