I agreed completely about the vote bots being great for promotion with a mix of gambling (less so with web apps) through in the mix. The steemit promotion button has never been a good option. I remember when whales started offering free promotion to promote it, but it never caught on b/c the value from it wasn't there. No return. There is only one good thing about it, it burns the steem used.

These issues with spam, reward pool hogs, etc etc will probably never disappear but I think the only solution that is reasonable to bring back a sense of curation is reducing the effect of upvotes to the 25% of the past (10 to 40). This has been the worst change to Steem that I can think of. Damn HF 19. I was completely for all of the changes in HF19 except this one. Boy was I right. But I was, and still am, a minnow. Maybe because of this change actually.

While I cannot blame the system (platform) for this because I am in no way entitled, the share of profits from the reward pool is greatly flawed. By changing the amount of votes a day, as you suggest and I have many times whenever possible, you just might see more posts being viewed and curated on a daily basis. This not only forces the spread the rewards, and thus longevity of the platform, but I think also fights spam just by recognizing good content. There is little benefit these days to producing high quality content and I have been struggling with this reality since the HF.

Thanks for you take. Hopefully we can make some changes soon. I hear rumors of some HF19 changes being reverted.