The point you made on buying upvotes is damn true.
Everyone can buy an upvote from the bots no matter what content they write in their posts.
I myself use those upvote bots to upvote my crappy posts sometimes.
The thing is that these bots should only upvote the posts with good content.

Coming to the steem power which some projects are currently offering, I am not against these services because you can buy that steem power if you have money, so that doesn't make any sense to me.
Or there should be a system where you can withdraw your money from steemit but no deposits should be made, that wil keep things transparent here on steemit.

I have been on steemit from july and my estimated account value is around $100 and a reputation of 51 while my friend who just joined steemit jumped to 52 in no time and gets more payout than i do.
That is simply because of the fact that he had money to power up his account.

There are a lot of other issues that need to be addressed @stellabelle