This post is quite old but you are speaking out what I'm thinking for some time. The whole selling point of steemit is to reward quality content but it doesn't. not with reach, not with visibility and not with money. I wonder If this could change when there is another interface that employs a different algorithm to curate the posts according to your interests like medium. of course that would be gamed by the whales as well but it can adapt. It's sad to see that the current team does nothing to limit the power of the whales but gives them a platform to distribute their spam. personally the currently employed curation algorithm gives me no benefit for my usage. The potential financial loss trough limited reach compared to medium makes it hard to justify posting here on steemit, even if i could earn 10 cent in steem dollars.