While I won't deny that voting bots (specifically those that just vote every author on the list) has been an issue, things have gotten a lot better on this front. While I have no doubt there are some of these that exist, ultimately those whales (since no one really has issue of the smaller votes doing whatever) have that choice to make. From what I've seen myself, a very large portion of these have at the very least passed of portions of their voting power to various curation groups and voting projects which has drastically improved the 'spreading the votes' to many more people. Life here in that sense is nothing like is was before say Hive account@curie and Hive account@robinhoodwhale first came around. Even though the trending page (which I rarely look at myself) may not reflect this, the portion that single authors (as a percent of the daily reward pool) has drastically dropped, well beyond simply the Steem price. Since starting the steemprentice group months back, I can attest first hand the ease for authors to at least get a couple of their posts picked up with a $20ish dollar payout. Ultimately though, it is up to each user to choose how they vote, and the whales are almost always in a catch-22 situation where no matter what they do there is somebody who is feeling undervalued.

On the nasty comments, I don't personally spend that much time in the political areas myself. However, that's what the flags are there for. As a community we have to be able to discuss 'touchy' topics in a constructive manner, those that simply provide ad hominem attacks that really are doing nothing but trolling (imo) can be flagged (having their rep damaged and potentially grayed out.) Unfortunately this is common anywhere on the internet especially on political issues, and this is simply our way of being able to deal with it here. I'm not excusing it by any right, but our only other option would be to ban/censor which isn't what this site is here for imo.

People voting 1%, meh, then just don't vote them back. Without trying to sound mean here, it sounds like you let some of these things get to you. Some are older problems in my view (which I easily can be missing these things myself) and others are just things to let go and move on. Why spend so much time focusing on things like this when there are so many better ways to spend our own time either on or off Steemit.

On the games and other SP distribution posts, I'm a fan of these specifically for what you mentioned. It's a way for users to stay engaged in some way, have some fun and be able to accrue rewards and build up their own accounts. Personally I find these to be very important for new users and the content consumer user type. While we do see certain ones on the trending pages a large portion of those payout earnings are being distributed back to those that participated, which I view as a great benefit. In my eyes the smaller portions that are kept are used to give a little something to those that write the posts (most of which are extremely in depth and I assume time consuming) and keeping the automation (scripts) functioning to do the payouts (like steemsports, where it'd be impossible to manually do on that scale.)

I'm sure there will those that disagree with me on these various points, just purely my current view.