If you read the last FFF carefully, they want the choice to matter. Currently, if you want to play effectively you have no choice but bots. That's not fun.

I, and likely many others, find that belts have a fundamental disadvantage that cannot be overcome and will cause players to want to use bots ...

The problem cannot be solved with more costs! When you are about to have bots researched you have in general more than enough resources (well, depends much on play-style, but I would say in most cases it is no problem to have 1000 instead of 100 robots. Which shows that this statement is more or ...

I believe the real problem with bots, their game breaking ability, is their inventory access speed. Think about it, if I have a chest which needs to be filled with resources, there is a hard limit on how quickly I can supply items to it using belts. Intuitively that limit is the number of inserters ...