There is no denying that an attention economy is being built. The platform would do well, however, to incentivise distributed mechanisms for promotion. As it stands, bidbots and those who delegate to them receive a disproportionate percentage of the reward pool indirectly by selling their share of it for (on average) more than what it's worth. The curation rewards that the rest of us get are just a nice little bonus to them.
I agree with @NoNamesLeftToUse The Writer/Artist Himself on several points and one of them is: the bidbot abuse must be addressed somehow, or soon there will be no reason for actual content creators to be here. I don't like it but it's basic maths. More and more people delegate to bidbots every day. Eventually honest curators are just going to run out of STEEM.
I know that's a terrible pun. It was my best attempt at comic relief. Unfortunately it has been a miserable failure. Sorry about that.
We had the chance to change the current advert-centric model prevalent in the mainstream social media, and for a while here on Steem it was working. I don't think we need to give up on that. Promotion and curation can co-exist peacefully... and the first step is bringing back curation by changing our consensus rules to beat the bidbots at their own game.