It also taught us all that there's a serious issue with bot abuse. All it takes is someone with a few bots and they can censor any post or comment that they want.

You are misunderstanding how this works. Unlike reddit where is is indeed documented that sock puppet bot armies can censor posts by downvoting them, in Steem, stake-based voting means that such tactics are ineffective. If someone wants to take stake that he owns and turn it into a bunch of bot accounts, that does not in any way gain influence over what could have been achieved using that same stake in a single account (in fact it is very slightly weaker).

Most of the bots on Steem are harmless gnats with little stake that are doing not much of anything except trying to make a tiny reward here and there, or perhaps cause annoyance and FUD. Your posts and comments got hidden because they were flagged by a majority of the stake that voted on them, not because of bots.