I often these kind of services myself, so from a pragmatic point of view I would naturally be completely in favor of this type of services. Without them, I could spend several hours per post to create the best content I can. And while I enjoy that, purely for the sake of making blogs, it's kind of disappointing when nearly no one see it.
In the current storm of posts that get uploaded to Steem every second, it's not easy to get noticed. So these services are a blessing, or maybe a necessary evil. Life for minnows would be much much harder without them.
Besides I have massive respect for the people that bring these services into life. The ability to make digital solutions do the things you want them to is sometimes mind-boggling to me.
From a principal view, I don't think that these bots are really a solution for the actual problem at hand, which is low visibility. When using these bots, the number of upvotes increases, the payout increases, but the number of views doesn't necessarily increase. It's just weird when you post has 80 upvotes, but only 5 views...
So I think the solution must be sought with a different approach. Maybe there could be enhanced features in Steemit itself to direct message or group chat, to create more groups that curate and promote posts around specific interest areas (tags), to have more of an in-house community building feel to the platform itself, instead of resorting on outside applications like steemit.chat and discord. But we are not there yet.
And until that time, the upvote services are a blessing, they give hope to minnows, they make Steemit more valuable as a platform and I think we should all be grateful for them.
I think the solution is to just keep steeming. Build your brand. Be consistent with regard to quality. It takes time. And I think pay-for-vote will help bridge the time it takes for a new author to build their brand to the point where maybe they don't need these services anymore.