You might enjoy my post here

Unfortunately we can only control ourselves and not what others do. I think right now it will keep going and there's not much we can do about it except not use them ourselves if we feel strongly about them.

I do believe the devs will eventually get around to fixing this though. I mean they have a promoted section, it just isn't very effective, so that means they want that functionality in here. The bots as you mentioned don't guarantee a profit, most will say that upfront, but if as you mentioned you do at least 50 SBD + you are guaranteed visibility. I think that is where the value is. It's not all about that initial profit, but depending on what you're pushing, just getting the eyeballs is probably valuable to you.

So honestly, I feel the bots are a band-aid to a flaw in the design of Steemit. You can't have a separate section where people have to opt-in to go get advertised to. People don't like being advertised to, but its the necessary evil we all put up with so we can have nice things. Redesign the promoted system to something that works, fix the bot problem.

I'm sure it's not as simple as all that, but I believe that's the root.