I think the "beneficial" are also open to abuse, basically anything that involves the potential for financial gain seems to attract abuse. So I guess only ginabot and remindbot are pure!

The path to disaster is always paved in good intentions!

In dustsweeper, I see the potential for abuse as it gathers up the dust, but at twice the initial investment. I would suspect (if not already) that there is easily a way to start harvesting the dustsweeper votes in an unintended consequences sort of way.

So it boils down to the question, does the tool benefit more than it harms? After all, it is the person using the tool that creates the morality of the use. (I realise this has echos of NRA, but I'm thinking more about nuclear physics... ).

In either case, I would consider that, as it is a part of the ecosystem, that transparency and oversight of the bot use and abuse is the best way forward. Blacklists, the inability to vote on dmania, the unencrypted memo field are all aspects of this. I would suggest that a ban, would just take the trading off the Steem chain and make it more difficult to see.

Personally, I use bots for visibility and for a slow way to reinvest SBD to SP. I tend to use them depending on how much effort I have put into writing the post. In the end, the feeling of writing a nice post is better than the number at the end. And I'm always much happier if there are comments that show someone has read it!