Yes, SEO has clearly a negative notion for me. To deceive the search engine and make it less useful for me is practically the job description of SEO, in my opinion.
For all the "no-evil" stuff, it's just plainly the work of a website programmer. Properly formatting your HTML, making it accessible and easily "readable" for machines is part of your job when you create a website. Same for creating a robots.txt. If you say many people don't know how to do that, then those people are just bad in creating websites and they need help of a professional website programmer/creator. No need for a term like SEO here.
I can see what you are saying but I see SEO a bit differently than being simply good web programming. It's about content organization as well as information flow. Some of the time that comes naturally to a webmaster, but there are so many content rich sites with poor web programming and poor organization. SEO is a niche side of web programming that fixes that specific problem. The skills of an SEO sometimes don't even cross the mind of a "good" web programmer because of the unknown unknowns factor. They just haven't thought about even attempting to rank a website on Google. They aren't investigating the competition to see where they fit, and how to be better.
For all the "no-evil" stuff, it's just plainly the work of a website programmer. Properly formatting your HTML, making it accessible and easily "readable" for machines is part of your job when you create a website. Same for creating a robots.txt. If you say many people don't know how to do that, then those people are just bad in creating websites and they need help of a professional website programmer/creator. No need for a term like SEO here.