As you have said, the Promoted page is pointless now and Trending is useless for finding good content. People tell me they have to buy votes to get noticed, but when some are spending hundreds of SBD it gets ridiculous. They don't even make much from doing so and the vote sellers are the ones getting rich. Okay so some of them distribute the rewards to those who delegate to them, but none of this is about quality content. It just turns into a bidding war to get to the top of the page as that's what most newbies will see.

For a while some whales were flagging some of the trending posts, but I'm not seeing that so much lately. 

You will see I'm using the #nobidbots tag on my posts to show my view. The pages for that tag have some good stuff on them that I will support.