You speak the truth @drutter. It's very sad that if you're in the <$5 post club (like me) and you wanna pay for some upvotes to maybe gain some new followers, the over-righteous gang will come swoop in on your post and reprimand you. Meanwhile, if you're in the over-righteous gang, you can possibly shitpost whatever the fuck you want and get upvoted to the moon.
Bidbots were definitely crap. It made the content just terrible. But the way it is now is not much better, and pretty much guarantees an oligarchic economy. Hopefully, the next hard fork will start to fix that. Resource credits, SMTs, and a Steemit token might be able to rejigger the economy such that we can actually true tokenized curation that is the real vision behind this community. But it's pretty frickin' hard to get that just right tbh.