There are ways Steemit could work, but unfortunately it would require either a massive change in the voting patterns of those with a lot of SP, or a fork in the code to have restrictions on self-voting, 'circle-jerk voting', etc.

I try to only ever vote for content that has not got over a $50 payout, as I think $50 is the most that someone should be expecting to receive from the platform considering the amount of great content that is going unrewarded. If more whales and dolphins played by the rule of 'ok, your post has already done well, lets share the wealth by voting on some post that hasn't', then we would see a fairer distribution. This strategy is counter-intuitive to curation rewards however.

Having an upper limit on potential earnings of a post (or even for a weeks worth of posts) is just one way of redistribution, but I havve seen very little discussion of such schemes.

The current system sucks, and ultimately only favoours whales, early adopters and a few lucky ones!