I agree with all you've said, but the question is how? Last year I wrote a post in the community "communities feedback".
Here is the link
https://steemit.com/hive-144703/@mycryptostalker/to-many-post-that-are-in-foreign-languages

The thing about steemit is that you can't choose easily (being easily the keyword) what to read. The whales that trend topics and posts, shouldn't be at the top and there are communities with so many pinned messages to the top that reading new posts becomes a hassle.

You should be able to choose from which languages you get the posts, also there must be an easier way to sort the new posts from new users to the top so they can stay motivated.
People is used to write but not to comment, because there is a general lack of interest.

This post - your post - has over $100USD in rewards, but this is going to be the first comment in over 6 hours, so curators, authors and witnesses should go in the same direction and that is "create a community" but they forget that inside a community there are several micro communities each with a language of their own and interest of their own - for it to preserve and flourish, each member should feel they belong and steemit makes it difficult for that.

So in a proper way to make this flourish I would in first place limit the upvoting only to the people that comment in the posts... and not only a 4 word "nice work, keep going" post, but something that encourages debate, exchange of ideas and engagement. For this new rules need to be written and more human interaction is needed for approving the comments, if the comment is not approved by other users, then the vote doesn't count and no upvoting is made, so no reward is "stolen" from the users that really engage.

I believe that now I'm ranting, so will keep discussion open :) LOL!