Personally, I think that unused votes are a bigger threat to steem's value than voting bots. It's demoralizing to authors who spend the time it takes to produce a quality article and go without recognition just because no one happens to see their article. I wrote about this here.

Granted, there are better ways to recognize quality than a simple author list, but it's a starting point. It'sort-of like sponsorships for athletes. They're still sponsored even when they deliver the occasional weak performance. If we pick our author lists carefully, I think it's good for steem and steemit. Future bots will be better, of course.