Here's my issue with Steemit. Not everyone has the capital to achieve high SP. The problem is that whales don't manually curate since its easier to sell votes to bots.

Having 1000SP earned barely gives a $0.20 vote. That's the issue. We have too many new users with sub 500 SP so there's not much to go around. What does go around only goes to vote bots. 1000SP should give at least a $1 upvote at full power. This way minnows can upvote meaningful content. All I see are the same individuals in the hot and trending tabs that self vote since they dropped $5000 back when Steem was under a penny and have ridiculous amounts of SP.

Based on my own observations, even with a sizable amount of 1200 followers, I rarely get more than 10 views. This is a large discrepancy from what you'd expect from such a large amount of followers. I feel that people buy votes in order to get to the trending pages so that they're seen by hundreds of thousands of Steemians and in return gain more votes and followers. However, the big drawback is along the lines of what you stated regarding Whales wanting quality content. From my findings, buying upvotes of less than say 30SBD will rarely get you any other votes.

When it comes to buying upvotes, it's either pay enough to hit trending, or be forgotten. It's all in the way that Steemit has been set up. We need tighter communities where people will actually view the hashtags that are tagged, rather than just clicking the hot and trending tabs. I doubt too many people even view the new tab since half of it is spam.

In my opinion, SP needs to yield more rewards so that the new users can have meaningful votes. $0.20 for 1000SP at full voting power is too little. If the rewards were payed at a higher rate for lower SP users, it would dramatically change manual curation and the amount of content. As it stands, most of these high SP holders just sell their votes since its a passive income without ever having to even log on to Steemit. Why would they manually curate if they have 100,000 SP? Just sell the votes and make a sizable income.

Granted, not everyone is like this - I've seen plenty of high SP holders voting for all sorts of great content. My only observation is that since joining this site in October, the amount of voting bots has increased exponentially and the amount of manual curation has gone down dramatically.

Sorry for the long reply!