If you agree that bots have their place, and are basically automated humans, why the emphasis on trying to weed them out by fiddling with incentives?

You are claiming that voting, as a bot, is significantly less costly than it is to a human. Right now this may be true because the market is still deeply inefficient due to it being very young and some very simple voting strategies are consistently working and affecting negatively the market (which is why bots are not seen in good light right now). But keep in mind that in a competitive environment (not the case right now) bots too need to make decisions to maximize their profits, and these decisions can't be made out of thin air. Either the owner of the bot regularly seats down and manually curate his bot list to weed out underperforming authors, add new rising authors, and identify potential new talent. Or the bot is fully automated in which case it needs to take its input from somewhere, this somewhere being all sort of things from past performance to keywords based heuristics to simply following someone else whose performance as a curator has proven to be good. Now, we aren't yet in an era where programs can parse and understand natural language, so once quantitative tricks start yielding too low margins due to increased competition, botters will have to move to qualitative analysis of the content to determine what content is actually valuable as this is the best predictor for success and higher returns. And what better way to do that than hiring curators (like Smooth is already doing) or following successful curators? Because of that, being a human curators with a talent to pick good content will increasingly lead to accruing a significant bot following and in some case land job opportunities as exclusive curator for a large stake holder. This will increasingly incentivize curators and redistribute some of the wealth captured by bots back to human curators. This in turn should serve as incentive for human curators to spend time reading content and building a track record of good picks for the bots to detect and act upon.

Why do I know this will work? Because this works exactly like that on the traditional financial markets. There are basically two main categories of trading: fundamental analysis and technical analysis. Fundamental analysis involves analyzing the assets in their economic, societal and political environment and determining based on their intrinsic qualities and fitness, as well as the image they project in the market, which assets will appreciate and which will depreciate. Technical analysis knows nothing of the assets and only analyzes market behavior, using all sorts of statistical methods to compute correlations, trends, momentum etc. to attempt to determine what to buy and what to sell based on mere probabilities. And at a higher level, there are traders who buy research from technical and fundamental analysts, consolidate the signals, and trade based on a hybrid model that combines both views. These days, there is even a new approach called "social trading" that involves specialized social networks for traders where traders both institutional and individual can propose macro views, analysis, strategies, signals or pronostics and get rated based on how much predictive power their research turns out to have retrospectively. The best rated "social traders" are being increasingly followed with the top performers being routinely poached by leading financial institutions. And then you have social traders who trade using optimized baskets of signals from other "social traders" etc. The point being that social trading is the ultimate melting pot of trading and AFAIK the best present manifestation of man-made swarm intelligence, and yet ... social trading involves **both technical and fundamental analysis** and anything in between, to the point where the limits is becoming completely blur and irrelevant.

Of course, at some times, it seems that systematic trading is taking over the market, and you will hear the fundamental analysis folks and other economists (who are generally having the biggest corporate titles and shout the louder) cry that bots have seized the market and more regulation is needed. You always hear something like that after a flash crash where it turns out that a bunch of dysfunctional bots raced the market to the ground. But in reality, fundamental traders are still completely driving the market. Bots hardly take any direction at all, at least not on a macro level. Bots have no emotion: no fear, no greed. They just find alpha and take it. The important market movements, bubbles of all sorts, rallies and corrections each time the Fed scratch their nose, market hickups on a political events and corporate jetset gossip, hype cycles, bear and bull markets etc. all this is the work of fundamental traders. They are the ones who move the trillions between markets and asset classes. Bots just smooth the curves and arbitrage the little inefficiencies here or there, detect and amplify the trends, middleman market movements they anticipated and accelerate mean reversion. Bots are just  swarming around the real decision makers of the market, picking the eventual bread crumbs and improvising themselves insiders of actions they don't understand. In spite of all that has been and is still being said on high frequency trading and automated trading in general being evil and the cause of all our troubles, bots have never, do not, and will not before a long time be the ones responsible for moving the market in any direction whatsoever except for the occasional bot accident.

Now, how does that relate to Steem? It's simple. Curation voting is trading in disguise, with manual curators acting essentially like discretionary fundamental traders voting based on qualitative analysis of the value of the content, and botters being systematic traders trying to derive signals from the technical analysis of the curation reward history, and modelling of the behavior of manual curators and other bots and the patterns their actions. Right now, I concur that there is still a strong imbalance between botters and curators, with botters having almost all the trading capital and overfitting a very very weak signal which lead to them amplifying mere noise. But with the recent price movements that lowers the bar of entry in the "whale club", the new budget allocation rules that favor content creation in the redistribution of inflation, and the fact early adopters have been and are still continuously powering down, the balance is  slowly but steadily shifting toward equilibrium between value minded curators and botters.

As the curation signal gets strongers, bots will actually start adding value, for instance by making the market much more responsive to the discovery of new talent. Right now, a promising new author may hover at mid-level in the Hot section without making it to the Trending section in spite of numerous small votes from real users. With more and smarter bots, the good lexical footprint of the post, together with the fast increase of popularity of the unknown post from many small accounts among which some may have good and uncorrelated curating track record will immediately signal good content and attract bot votes, propelling the new author well into the top tiers of the Trending page. This is just one example of how bots could eventually turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to Steem in retrospect.

The bottom line is that trying to prevent bots is both counterproductive and pointless. Bots are an unavoidable and actually beneficial element of a *well structured* free market, the emphasis being on "well structured". Instead of focusing on the sisyphean task of getting rid of bots, energy would be better spent on pushing for a higher diversification of stake ownership either by promoting more heavily Steem to demographics that are likely to provide good content creators and curators (college students, academics, artists, authors, columnists, bloggers, web marketers, ebook writers etc), campaigning to convince existing content creators and manual curators that holding their SP / powering up their liquid earnings is a good idea (which would provide a refreshing change after having read so many posts from authors who complain that stake is imbalanced but are powering down their holdings anyway hereby making the situation even worse), and last but not least lobbying SteemIt Inc to start doing carefully designed and thoroughly KYC'd Steem Power giveaways from their gigantic premine to the same hand picked demographics I mentioned earlier.