The value of trending depends on the quality of content on Steem. As the quality of content on Steem improves people will flock to Steem, and the Steem ecosystem will raise in ranking and awareness online. This in turn improves the value of getting on trending.

Bot services provide an immediate use case for STEEM/SP, this is true. But focusing on Steem being a place for high quality information sharing is a long-term focus, which the bot services can, and arguably have already stifled.

Human curation programs are the ideal way to move forward. This can create jobs for real people, more than just curator jobs too. If quality becomes evidently more important than quantity, people may hire and compensate professional writers, editors, translators, artists and musicians to improve the quality of their content, and they might begin using STEEM directly for those services.