I've been thinking a lot about this problem we are having and I like to view it from different perspectives.
One key perspective for any investor is the return of investment. You can look at investment as time spent here blogging or if you spent your own money to buy and power up Steem. Either way that Steem is generating returns, even though your blogs from one year ago are definitely forgotten and can't be voted on again, through Steem you accumulated back then, with the help of delegations
those blogs actually continue making you returns, which is one of the main reasons why would anyone hold Steem Power, as well as curating and helping other people grow. For me that is a positive view on delegations, returns for yourself and the growth of the community if you didn't delegate all to bots.
That said there are a lot of issues connecting delegation to any of the paying bots, I personally delegated 10k Steem to Smart Steem (the rest 5k Steem I'm still using for curating good content), and I have a mixed feelings about that delegation, it is absolutely awesome to have that master node kind of deal where your stake is generating decent returns for staying fateful to the platform, but the bad part is this, the bot owners do not actually care (they say they do but they don't) who they are selling that vote to. Case in point, Steemit trending page.
Clearly something is broken here. With adsactly, velimir and haejin raping that reward pool every day for many months now, it's not showing the real potential this platform has to offer.
I personally would give up my delegation (which is I'll say it again absolutely awesome feature this blockchain has to offer) for better overall state of the platform.
It is a wild wild west right now, we need to govern Steem reward pool way better than we do today.
Good start would be a limit to vote buying not exceeding 50$ total, let's be real none of those 500$ payed posts are worth being on the trending page. Second good move would be a reduction of selfvote rewards exponentially after every selfvote. That move will reduce reputation score of abusers going up faster. Some people will not like the change but who cares, they've made enough.
Soon we won't be able to return to old ways where some great content would sometimes rise on the trending page, the monster bot army will become too big and bought shitpost will be a sad reality for many more years to come, and guess again who you'll be seeing for many more years to come on that trending page. Those nice guys I mentioned above. Hello Vietnam!
Not everything is bad though, I don't use trending page, my trending page is people who I follow, chosen by me. Everyone can create their own trending, so the "real" trending page shouldn't even matter to anyone who knows the bad apples populating it.
Just know that only good code can fix the overall state of Steemit and that will take time. Right now Steemit is going through an identity crisis, but as always everything can change for the better. Stay patient, good days will come.