You have some assumptions here that you don't have any facts on.

Let me at least clear some up.

First, when you say:

The trending was usually controlled by notorious self-voters/circle-jerkers and by popular authors and the curation trails following them.

This is precisely what led to bots being so wanted by people. For the first time ever minnows and smaller fish could actually get their content seen. It was all circle voters because of how the reward system is laid out. Curation only really helps an account with a lot of sp. You get more curation reward for posts that payout well. This basically set the stage for whales to circle jerk instead of reward undervalued content. Why would they? What is the benefit to them?

You are right that bot votes are taking up trending. It's also true that many of these posts are still crap. This was the case with the circle jerk votes. Since these guys were whales nothing much was done. Now that it is minnows it seems everyone wants to attack. The truth is that bots are providing a much needed service (getting a small fish noticed that never would be otherwise and we proved that for months with the circle jerking whales that use to be at top of trending). However, that service is being abused frequently and is pretty hard to stop. If all of those posts were good posts that used bots so people would see them it really wouldn't be much of an issue.

all bid-bot operators, delegators, or users, are all doing it for profit only, and have no intention of creating value in the network. That's what I personally believe.

First of all, after all the good that I do on the platform myself (hundreds of people will verify that) I really take offense to this ill informed statement.

Second, bots are a business. Businesses in all societies pull more money that individuals and often even supply jobs to individuals. There is a much bigger picture than you are seeing here.

Of course you are entitled to your opinion, however this statement is like saying all black, asian, or jewish people are bad. You are slinging insults at people you know nothing about, for reasons you understand even less. You simply cannot lump a group of people like this, its basic prejudice.

The metagame has shifted, and more and more whales are delegating to bid-bots as it became a convenient and hands-free method of speculation. It gives out ROIs similar to self-voting, without having to get flagged by @berniesanders afterwards.

It's true that more whales are delegating to bots. However, the ROI can never be more than around 1/2 of what self voting is. Because bidders basically do not over bid these days thanks to the bot tracker. They stay at an average of 1/2 what the bots full vote is. So, if you had a vote of $10 bidders will generally bid a total of $5 or less. So the ROI is about half of what self upvoting is (apparently, self voting is not considered abuse anymore which leads me to believe that bots are just the new fight and eventually we will leave them alone too just like we all let @grumpycat upvote himself into thousands of dollars a week when a few months ago this would have been considered super horrible behavior)

More whales are delegating to bots because, in case you have not noticed, the main focus for the average person here (especially whales) is to profit. When you design a platform on money it is expected that nearly everyone will use it for sheer profit. You simply cannot expect the world to act on integrity before money when it is laid at their feet so easily. This platform has been, since inception, a giant magnet for those that seek only profit.

Not sure if you have noticed but most bots are now offering in the high 95%+ returns to delegators. Meaning that as a delegator you will reap the full benefit of owning a bot and never have to do any of the work. As a whale, how could you refuse that? Personally I find that a little sickening but again, platform centering on money attracts people using it for sheer profit.

Before it was whales controlling profits, then bots interjected and they had to now share some of that profit. With bot owners now offering 98%+ returns to delegators it is right back to whales controlling profits again. Just like when trending was all circle jerking whales, the money is going to the same people.

We will not stop people from trying to use this platform by trying to force bot owners to do our bidding. Just like in real society we never really stop people who do the same. This is a society. The money made it that way. There are only so many real dollars printed each year just like there are only so many steem printed each day. Its really the same.

For thousands of years society has thrived as an economy rich with good and bad. people doing things "right and "wrong". In every example, what they try to stop they only encourage. No matter how many laws are made, people simply do what they want. The best part? Society is still here! It is not the abusers that will ruin this place. It is the fight that is started against them.

That is precisely how oppression is born.

There have been countess tests of removing laws from different societies and nearly every time you see an immediate influx of people doing the now "legal" thing then a smoothing out of it. In a short time you start to see that those people become less and simply meld into society as one of us instead of being caught up in a massive fight that only hurts people and causes "collateral damage". The "bad people" always have mouths to feed and a family that gets affected from the fight as well. Mother Theresa was even quoted after being asked to attend an anti war rally, "No, I won't attend. If you hold a pro peace rally I will." (not exact quote but you get the picture).

Whatever you stand against, you empower. There can be no peace, happiness or positive energy when we stand against each other.

No matter how much "dirty money" people make, the economy still exists and grows. Not to mention "dirty money" is nearly always defined by people exposing that money to make their own, like in the case of @grumpycat.

What I believe we can fix easily, is the trending. Just like how back in the past @grumpycat pushed bot owners to enforce the 'no vote after 3.5 days' rule, I believe we should add more rules to bid-bots usage through downvote-pressure, this time by punishing creators who use bots to reach into the trending. Spending 2 SBD to get some visibility in a sub-tag is kinda fair, but scammers spending 400 SBD to promote their ICOs (without the content being marked as an ad in steemit/busy/etc) is terrible for our community (they get scammed) and gives out a bad image to newcomers and potential investors.

This simply will not work. It will only spread a war that no one wants. Nothing was accomplished by @grumpycat's efforts at all and the proof you need is in your own post. (Bots are still ruling trending with crappy content.) Nothing was solved by this. In fact all it did was start a war and brew a ton of hate, oppression and opposition. The only thing that can stop the abuse of bots is manual curation of their bidders. Think about it. Do you think most of those posts would be bid on if it were not automatic? If you want to "fix" trending it needs to not cater to the highest bidder and be able to be sorted according to whatever filter we choose. Then we would not all see the very same things at the "top" and the fight to get there simply would not exist.

The responsibility to stop bot abuse is on the bot owners. Their bots are making the votes. It's not about what YOU think is right, it's really about whether I'm allowing my bot to vote on things that I would not vote on myself. If bots all had their own abuse rules (many are starting to), they could do as I and a couple others are doing and pull votes/blacklist abusers. This is basically a never ending battle and must be done on a continued basis. However, the users definitely notice it, so do the abusers. This puts the real abusers in the spotlight while cleaning up what bots vote on at the same time.

The truth is that no matter what "rules" you try to force people into you will create resistance or worse. However, if a bot has a rule then you simply cannot use the bot if you don't follow it. There is no resistance in that. This is how all other business work, policies. If the user does not like the policy they will have to go elsewhere.

This is exactly why @steembotcleaners was formed. It is a team of human, manual, curators that comb bots lists of bidders. It is in its infancy and has already worked wonders for my bot as a test subject. In a couple more weeks I'm sure they will be able to offer their service to all other bots as well.

Nothing about this issue can be solved overnight. It all takes time, it is not, in any way, a simple issue.

I urge you not to waste yours pointing fingers at people in your fellow community without consideration of the multitude of people (bot owners) that are currently working on solving the issue.