In my opinion the main issue that plagues Splinterlands players in the lower leagues are the bot accounts. It is very easy to create an AI that plays Splinterlands way better than any real player could. The game has simple set rules and the AI developers can calculate exactly which chance to win one set of cards has against another. Especially beginners who are just getting their feet wet in the game stand no chance against all the mathematically optimized AI opponents.

When I went on holiday a few weeks ago, I decided to rent out almost my complete collection and only kept low level cards that weren't worth renting out.
The weather was bad, so I decided to play some SL on bronze just for fun.
(I can only encourage anyone to repeat this experiment, it will open your eyes)

TLDR: It was NOT fun at all! Extremely frustrating!

I usually end the season in higher gold / lower diamond. This time, I began the season in lower bronze and even descended into novice for a short time until I slowly managed to climb into silver with the help of some stronger cards (a single Kron in your deck works wonders btw.).
But even in silver all I face are still lv1 summoners with lv1 monsters. Most of the time not even a single lv2 monster.
After going through all this trouble I opened my 10 daily hard earned bronze chests: Not a single card inside. This is going to kill SL in the long run. New players need to have fun and get a reward, especially when they have to fight hard to achieve something.

Personally I'd rather vote for this proposal:
-> Only allow bot accounts for a limited period of time when players need to wait more than 30 sec to find an opponent in their current league. If ranks are full, they are full.

Bots may have been necessary in the early days of SL when there were not enough players for match making but now they became just leeches draining money from new players.

Just my 2 cent.