@penston there's nothing unfair about the bid-based voting bots. Everything is completely open and transparent and never has there been any guarantee of profitability.
I've considered the idea of refunding any bids that cross the profitability threshold as you suggest but there are a few problems with that. The most obvious being that most bid bots of any size need to pay for their SP, and it's pretty pricey these days. I highly doubt any of them will be open to refunding bids for this reason.
Also, profitability calculations are based on current prices of STEEM and SBD whereas the post payout happens in the future. If someone thinks prices are going to increase, they may want to try to capitalize on that increase by making big bids which show as unprofitable now, but may end up being profitable on payout.
There are plenty of bots who advertise their services by saying you can make x hundred percent SBD if you make a bid at or above a certain minimum. They don't spell out that you can make a loss of 50% or more.
The frequency at which I'm seeing people losing SBD suggests that they don't realise what they've gotten themselves into.
It sounds as though you're saying that bots can't continue to operate unless they rake in SBD/STEEM from excess bidding. Is that true?