Carry on! Steemit is an experiment, whether it is a successful experiment is truly a matter of what we make of it. I agree that the down vote bots are probably just as bad as the "reward pool" bots, but seeing as I personally never had a huge return for most of my posts I always felt that was not about me, but rather a "big fish" thing.

For all the "bad" Steemit limps along. I think that the steempress is one of the more interesting and perhaps long term beneficial developments on the blockchain.