Please tell me this is not news to you.

I never said it was.

And it makes it even worse, because users with power - like yourself - have accepted this sorry state of affairs and its been languishing this long.

So why is Steemit going to succeed? Is it to train a new generation of bots to monetize and comment on each other's posts?

Because that's the only use-case I see with the current system.

Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.