The standard is whatever quality people need to reach before they can get an audience.

Thats the point I dont agree with ( i mean, I agree with it, but thats not whats going on here). The level of quality needed to reach an audience here has been removed by the ability to collude outside the network. That collusion is not something that can be solved on the blockchain level. Because of that, it needs a centralized way to control behavior of steemians. All bidbots are, are centralized power if you think about it. the difference is that it can be removed just as fast as it was created, thanks to delegations.