Certainly, Steemit offers tremendous reward potential...I especially like your description of the internal economy. Definitely, I am not criticizing that aspect.

What I am forwarding is that penal powers, so to speak, are just as corruptible in either a centralized or decentralized platform. Decentralization is probably much more likely to be corrupted simply because no penal standardization exists -- everyone can downvote for any or even NO reason whatsoever!

My initial idea is to have upvotes levered to wealth, but downvotes levered to consensus only. Meaning that at least a minimum number of downvotes have to be registered before a post can incur a financial or reputation penalty.