Bot owners can do it, but other question - why would they? There are bot owners who are thinking the best of the community and bot owners who just want to maximize their profits. Even if we can get a bunch of bot operators to run their bots more ethically, I'm quite sure there will just pop up more options which people will use.

And about the trending page, you are pretty much right. I'm hoping more people will just skip the trending page and start finding good content on their own, but the trending page is easy and attractive to many users :)