Simply allowing authors to give higher curation rewards to attract upvotes, is like the 100 homeless people bidding for only a fraction of the 10 meals. The lower amount any person will accept, the more likely they will get that small fraction of a meal. But it won't be enough to sustain them over time.

In my analogy the homeless and 10 meals are the curators and curation rewards not the authors and authors rewards.
The portion of the curation ( 10 meals) will increase accross the board which is absolutely necessary for people to diversify their votes and change their voting habit.
Established authors may still use the same curator/author ratio but new authors who set the curation percentage high are going to earn a lot more than they currently do. ( I've given an example with exact numbers in OP)

I like how you said that the bots are a manifestation of a broken system. Some bots are helpful for the overall system health

Generally speaking yes, if bots are required to make the system healthy then something is missing in the code.
For example bots are needed to support minnows, this mean the incentives created by the code are broken.