Late to this post, but happy to find it. The issue I have with bidbots isn't anything you mentioned. It's an existential matter. Our survival literally depends on this issue, and that is automation. Either we support society or we destroy it. Botting destroys it. That automation of social engagement will destroy humanity unless we prevent it, or we'll be lucky to prevail in a Butlerian Jihad - but I won't be holding my breath on that. I don't think we'd prevail.
Autovotes, delegations, trails, vote buying, all of these automate our social interactions and all of them degrade humanity to the level of toasters. We can't elevate bots to the level of humanity (this venue isn't nominal to fully demonstrate why, but consciousness doesn't arise in the brain. We literally have no idea where consciousness comes from or what it is. Neural networks mimic the brain, which is just a meat calculator our consciousnesses use, and is not potential of intelligence. The appearance of intelligence AI has is nothing more than projection). Stake is merely a convenience for social interaction of human society, and the sacrifice of everything to attain to stake is a fatal flaw that will, sooner or later, result in casualties, and I am not exaggerating. What matters to us isn't tokens. Mike Tyson famously accused Don King of being willing to sell his momma for a dollar. That glaringly reveals the weakness of stake as a metric. Humanity is far more valuable in innumerable ways, existentially necessary to our survival and felicity across spectra we are hardly even cognizant of because we have been indoctrinated by Machiavellian manipulators to corral us into profitable pens where we are farmed for their benefit. Traitorous psychopaths willing to extinguish humanity because they are incapable of socialization are broken - not better than the rest of us. Their fortunes are a symptom of their disease, not desirable goals we should emulate.
Either we are people socializing here, or bots will conquer Hive and turn it into a machine that generates digits. Your views completely fail to acknowledge the very existential danger humanity faces today of being automated to death. Just ask Yuval Hariri. While I doubt I've presented anything that might convince you to mitigate your practices, I hope I've at least opened a view into Hive you haven't before peered through.
Taxation, BTW, is theft. DV's are taxation, and are appropriate when countering duplicity, as you point out in discussing plagiarism (which is a form of theft), but not otherwise. Certainly not to prevent distribution of Hive tokens so as to enable the majority of stake to be held by an oligarchy, which, whether you will publicly agree, has been and is being done, and is actually the case. Hive is a pure plutocracy, so governance is attained by a majority of stake and collusion amongst the majority stakeholders enables that majority to be continuously maintained - and that is not an accident.
That is a ruling class, whether you have acknowledged it or not, like it or not, or are willing to admit it or not. It is what it is. But that's far less important than human survival, and Hive matters to that, believe it or not, because it is a wave humanity surfs today that will determine, or can determine, whether human society will surmount AI. That is a life and death issue, and when I first brought this up years ago people scoffed, because AI was rudimentary and incapable of mimicking human interactions. That's not the case anymore. It's questionable whether we can even discern a difference. Turing tests are obsolete, and we are incompetent presently to devise better.
But there is no question that flesh and blood matters, and either Hive is society or it will be automated and you, me, and every human being that lives, will be denied this mechanism humanity invented to increase our felicity. That is the one metric that matters, that humanity is the focus of our social interactions and our felicity preserved and advanced. Any, and everything else is hazard that either will be mitigated by people, or will destroy people.