I cannot agree more. Currently Steemit is dominated by two entities: whales and bots. The former (whales, including me) mostly decide payouts, and the latter (bots) has influences on voting counts (and some portion of payouts by like @wang). As a result, average users have no room to show their influences, until they become whales or bots. Many users already turned to be bots, at least partially. As majority of accounts became bot-driven, and the bots are more likely to follow whales (since it gives them more curation rewards with higher possibilities), the problem is getting worse now.

I am not totally against automated bots, by the way. It sometimes makes users life easier, especially when they want to be in favor of certain other people (e.g. within community vote, a huge fan-ship for celebrities). However, it shouldn't significantly influence payouts, which is a measurement of "perceived value from the community". Bots have no perception at the moment (I don't think AI tech hasn't reached to recognize contents' value from the perspective of a community), so bot-dominated system is not desirable now.

My position is to remove curation rewards. While it makes the system less gamific, people (not bots) still have motivations to be influential in the community and to be favorable towards others who give satisfaction for them.