Looking at the accounts with suspicious activity, it does not take a genius to work out many of these accounts are bot accounts

Exactly and I am not sure if you have noticed or not but whenever you post on Steemit, you are being followed by many bot accounts, like more than 50. It's been happening from the last two weeks and not sure if anyone else noticed this suspicious activity.

May was a slower month in terms of new user registrations. The slowest month to date this year.

In my opinion, Steemit Inc should be focusing on retaining the 60K users who have been active here instead of promoting Steemit to new users. Build a community first, fix the problems and people will automatically be attracted to this platform.

Looking at the accounts that powered up, well sad as it is, many of these are just delegating for profit,

That's the main problem here, why not these investors work with some minnows/red fish, start a project for the community and profit from this project, like a win-win situation for everyone! Delegating your SP to bots and taking SBDs on daily basis doesn't seem to be very humanly or engaging behavior.

Anyways, as usual, wonderful analysis. I have been following your posts since I started working on this analysis stuff and I guess this is the first time I am commenting on your post :)