First off, I admittedly do not yet have the same level of understanding of the Steem economy as you do. But, I see an opportunity to perhaps "fight fire with fire"—although the plan would pivot off of diligent 'quality controls'.
The trending page is our advertisement to the outside world; the users on the outside world are the people we need to engage positively with this platform to see it grow into the mainstream. If there were a way to use the bots in tandem with scrupulous quality control standards so that high quality creators could pay to have their works featured on the Trending page, while low-quality bot-promoted content would be shoved back down into the depths with flagging—the content seen and shared by the outside world would then hopefully get Steem recognized as being a platform that houses unique and high quality content—which would then motivate the creation of new accounts and garner new investors.
That's a VERY quick and dirty thought bubble; I realize the practical application of it is complicated. Perhaps it could be something like "Whitelisting," where only approved accounts and creators would be allowed access to the bots to be used just as paid-placement is used on other platforms; if the accounts abuse their privelage, they would be blacklisted or placed on probation.
Ah, you are touching upon a slightly separate aspect, which is just the quality of trending itself. I remember arguing in the past that the way we would actually achieve the quality is by actively downvoting, and I can't find links now but plenty of people have argued for doing so. If enough stake is used to downvote trending, it will clean up trending, and would have the effects you are talking about. And funny enough, re: fight fire with fire, check out @bid.bot which amuses me very much.
The other part I'll touch on is that the trending page is an advertisement to the steemit world too, which is why plenty of people are taking initial losses to gain a lot of attention on trending.
I don't think using stake for promotion in the form of bid bot economy is the right way to do promotion. It shouldn't take anything from the reward pool. Trending is owned by the platform, not by bid bots, they simply took control of it because no other promotion form exists. And the other aspect of that is that the payout values don't mean anything with bid bots. It's just a mess. One way I saw that is interesting to me, and would address the concern about taking from the reward pool is what @freebornangel is suggesting in their comment, which is that all bid bots simply should focus on the promotional aspect and require all posts to be declining rewards. The problem is... well, fat chance getting any of them to budge.
Hello @douglasbalmain it seems you have a pretty good grasp on the whole. Let me throw in a little wrench, how about we just form a group ((i do not care where) discord maybe)) where the more angelic whales (if there is a such thing) could by chance take up a few slots in key time placements.
Also, we must keep remind ourselves that roughly 500,000,000 will come back into this market and we will have to push blockchain only platforms. Now, I know...you guys are not all hip and trendy with b#i#t#t#u#b#e but they are a friend. More so than big brother google, OK. Just wanted to add my two sense, as a full steem ahead type good white hat wearing wanna be sixty recognition score. I just followed you and resteemed this post. Thanks to all.