Nice reply!
The first part sounds promising.
Concerning the second part:
Yes, actually, I am also fascinated by some chess programs, 'masterpieces' of software and (partly) AI.
And I also respect people who will write better and better Splinterlands bots in future (yes, that's indeed also "cool"). :)
A pure bot championship would be actually fascinating, too: who is able to write the best, most sophisticated Splinterlands bot? In chess there are competitions only for software ...
Especially in chess, bots are great tools to practice one's skills, analysing games and learning to understand chess better.
(Interesting also for Splinterlands could be the idea that some chess programs are having certain modes in which they intentionally don't always play the best possible move to make the games against human opponents more exciting and variable.)
However, one difference is that in chess (or GO) in (human) tournaments and public servers bots are strictly forbidden. That means human players are never forced to play against a bot if they don't want. They can intentionally challenge a chess program (if they really think they would be able to beat 'God') :-) or just practice with it, but in human tournaments they can be sure to face human opponents only.
Concerning Splinterlands that could mean, there could be different kinds of competitions in future, for example "bot only", "human only" and "mixed". Then at least everybody would have a choice. And I know very well that even if 'we' would try to implement these different kinds of tournaments it would be very difficult to verify that a 'human' is really a 'human'.
Why should anybody play themselves, if bots do the same without wasting time and energy? In the end with this vision Splinterlands might become an inhabited ghost town where bots play against bots. A pure staking mechanism but no game anymore.
If the daily games are too many for a human, just make them less.
You also don't tell a soccer player like Lionel Messi to play 5 soccer games per day. :)
Create conditions within the game which humans can fulfil.
I wrote a longer post about it some time ago.
Yes, we are all investors (I am also one since 2018), but in my opinion long term every investor earns most if the game is developing well and attracts as many as possible satisfied new players.
And the big majority of human players prefers to play against other humans ...