I totally agree with you, with creating bots comes a high demand of abuse. It does not reflect the quality of your content. You are totally right.

In my opinion is the reason for a upvote-bot demand Steemits failure of making content discovery right. I mean you only get seen if you are in Hot or Trending and this depends on your pending payout not your quality. Also is tag browsing really bad in Steemit. Upvote-Bots gives you atleast a chance to be seen.

I think if they make content discovery better, the upvote bots will decline :)

Nevertheless is it quite interesting to develop bots (e.g upvote bots), because you get a basic understanding how the infrastructure of the steem blockchain works. And that's the only purpose of this project, giving people and easy start on understanding steem ;)