This is something you and I have been discussing for months in private, so without a doubt I agree with what you've said.
We're currently at a point where most SP are claiming back their vote rewards one way or another (bid bots, self votes, delegation market, vote swapping etc). It's not longer a problem of bad actors, if it ever was in the first place. It's a problem of misaligned economic incentives causing individual profit maximization strategy to be harmful to the entire system overall.
I'm guessing many whales are in the very same position as myself: we don't want this to continue. Unfortunately, we also can't trust other large stakeholders to refrain from the allure of profit maximization, so we all protect our own stake by partaking in the very activity that's deteriorating our investment. It's tragedy of the commons in full swing.
The issue isn't that bots or individual actors are malicious or greedy; very few people invest in crypto for altruistic reasons. When designing an economic system, you must assume everyone will attempt to maximize profits. When individual efforts to maximizing profits contribute to the value of the whole, then it's a successful system. But when the optimal profit maximization strategy under your system undermines the value of the whole, then you have a flawed rewards structure, that is to say misaligned economic incentives.
The entire economic system cannot be designed to depend on the selfless sacrifice of moral saints paying a high price in order to just keep in check the perfectly rational actions of individual profit maximizers, which is where we are now and why the battle is failing.
In short, readjust the economic incentives to alter profit maximizing behavior. Under other systems such as superlinear and higher curation for example, profit maximization does not involve direct or indirect self votes and bid botting market have difficulty in price discovery. Of course other alternative economic incentives/curves/curation rates etc can be explored.
It's unfortunate that you were the only person I was able to convince that this was the correct approach, and you weren't able to convince anyone else when you reached out individually either. The scope of the problem is at the level of economic incentives (I believe Linear, despite all its advantages, is the predominant cause of this), not at the level of individual bad actors. And trying to fight it on the level of individual bad actors would likely fail.
RE: Embracing Linear Equality on Steem: Unlearning the Sucker & Maximising the Arsehole in Me