I really appreciate you taking the time to break all this down. I learned tons. I too have been against auto voting and bots but this made it all make sense. Sadly it seems that this part of the "game" may indeed lead to a community where less posts are actually read and engaged with which leaves us with essentially a platform based on simply following the top authors and trying to blindly upvote their content first. This leaves very little incentive for a "top author" with low integrity per se to continue putting out quality content as Steem really starts to blow up. If you know you have the auto voters waiting for your every post, why try so hard?