I've heard the term bid bots over the years, and had a rough idea of what they were, but your explanation sums it up pretty well.

The plan laid out is a good way of incentivising people to engage more with thoughtful comments, but I think there would need to be some way to determine whether someone is giving truly thoughtful comments or just waste comments. I noticed a long time ago that there are people commenting 50+ times per day. Ecency has a scoreboard where users earn Ecency points for commenting, so in a way, it incentivizes people to comment a lot, while saying nothing, or copy and pasting comments, which is pretty common too.

Sifting through genuine commenters and engagers and separating them from bot-like commenters chasing the leaderboard top score would be tough, but if that could happen, and less frequent genuine engagement was rewarded, it would really help to encourage and grow the type of community spirit we want to see.

Also, I kind of understand how burning works, and understand it's a good way to cut down on the supply of the token, but would it not be a good idea to have people send their Hive to a new curator account, which would be powered up and used? It would have a fairly low stake initially, but after a while, it could hold a significant amount of HP, and it would be an extra curator on the scene.