Hola @philhughes
Last night I read your post, but today, after sleeping and resting my mind, I decided to respond.

You have touched on very important points here. Investors are necessary, without a doubt, but those who focus on buying votes to obtain benefits, but at the same time create low quality content, can make it seem that this platform is only about that, and I understand the point of being an investor, it is have a benefit.

Now, there is a story with this from The diary Game, more than 3 years ago, when there was a change of management at Steemit INC, which were very difficult times on the platform, where another similar one was created, many of the users abandoned Steemit and they left, under great pressure, for the other platform, leaving Steemit with few developers as well as few users.

A strategy implemented at the time to attract more users was the creation of that dynamic "The diary game", many (a large majority) of the users who are here on Steemit today, made their debut here with the diaries , and it is logical, it is something extremely easy to do and also very basic. It served to increase the user mass but undoubtedly lowered the quality of the publications.

I, who have been here for 6 and a half years, have been able to see high-quality posts previously, which touched on topics of great depth and were highly valued, for their work and contribution, but by including the Diaries, after the migration of a large mass of users to the other platform, what we see today was created, where newspapers have served to bring many to the platform due to the simplicity of creating them.

In particular, I think that a platform where content is a priority, the quality of the content must be raised, so that it makes sense for a user, perhaps as you say, with a journalistic, or scientific, or culinary sense, etc., to want to dedicate time to Steemit, otherwise, we will always continue seeing the same thing over and over again.

But I must highlight that changes are taking place in another direction, I believe and I hope that this trend continues, where more content of another style is supported, which contributes beyond daily experiences.
Greetings.