Hey Shayne,

I spent close to 18 months trying to do the things I thought were good for the platform. Manual Curation, leaving comments, putting together reasonable content. I am not an aspiring Author and I certainly don't think we should limit the site to that type of content, so I wasn't trying to get to the trending page.

So, I spent a lot of time and energy, watching everyone else's stake grow while my account was lagging behind. One ends up leaving a lot of Steem on the table when you don't use autovoting and such.
At one point Pharesim was following my vote because he knew I was manually curating and picking some good content. Because he did not want to be accused of abuse, he made sure that I didn't benefit from this directly. The end result was those I was curating were out earning me every step of the way. Don't get me wrong, I appreciated the weight he brought my vote, but there was nothing in it for me. I was watching the Chosen Accounts that received first support and later delegation from SteemIt, dominate the trending page day after day. Everyone seems to have forgotten the site quit being about content long before the bidding bots.
I don't even think that "Quality Content" should be a goal at this point all the discussion about it stifles and intimidates new users and limits engagement. Cream rises to the top, let people post and vote and eventually, the steady content creators will gain attention.

During that same period while I was "doing things right" I also realized that SteemIt, Inc. isn't going to develop the front-end in any manner that is going to make it attractive to "mainstream" and our end-users and fiscal policy make our content a bit edger than other sites and most people can't take it.
Steemfest was the final blow. All the focus on SMTs and Communities. I knew that SteemIt Inc was going to encourage other applications being developed on the blockchain that will ultimately compete with SteemIt for traffic and visibility.
The game for me changed. SteemIt is just a distribution tool for steem and the reward pool is there for networking and distribution until there are more "Mission Centric" apps built.
At this point I am gathering Steem. If someone isn't using their voting power and they want to sell it to me, I am buying it.
I still manually curate, respond and engage in the community, but I am over thinking that we are building a site built on content here. That will be up to communities and app builders.
So, yes, I am using the bots, and I do not feel the least bit bad about it. I am trying to make up for lost time as well.
Thanks for asking and I enjoyed your calm non-judgemental attitude.

I view the bidding bots as the greatest equalizer we have seen so far, that allows end-users to promote their content and get visibility over those we watched dominate the platform for so long. I am happy they are here and I applaud those that are using them.