In the end of the day personal profit always wins out over collective benefit.

I don't even think bid bots are profitable, they're more often than not over bid.

Steemit needs to improve content discoverability before the use of bots will decline. If it's more likely to make profit by just posting good content then we'll see more people focus on content. For now, quality content more often than not goes unrewarded as it often goes unseen, and even 100 upvotes can be pretty much worthless if they're from 100 minnows.