Great write-up mate, as always!

It's funny, since you first wrote about this topic a couple of months ago, I've gone from using bidbots for almost every post, to practically never using them. The only services I'll use now are @thundercurator and @treeplanter.

My reasoning for this, after speaking with some other people, is that buying votes both is putting large percentages of the available Steem and SBD into the hands of a few, as well as for the reasons you've brought up like inflating the value of payouts and damaging user expectations.

I recently went through my following list and had a massive cull (thanks for that advice by the way!), but the sad thing was I noticed around 2/3 of all the users on there were no longer active and hadn't been for months. Despite Steemits user base growth recently, I don't think the number of active users has really increased all that much, but that's a separate issue I guess.

I need to do more research, but I think the upcoming Hard Fork 20 removes bandwidth all together, which means that Steemit Inc. don't need to delegate to new users for them to use the platform. Honestly, I'm skeptical if this is gonna make any difference, as plenty of the SDL accounts had their delegation removed but they still continue. We'll see I guess!