Thus there would be no incentive to make any good content and develop a following or for that matter to use STEEM social media platform.

I think this is the key misconception.

I post on steem because I don't have to divulge any personal or credit-card info.

I post on steem because I enjoy having conversations with people from different walks-of-life.

The voting dust is nice, but there are much better ways to support the bloggers you like.

For example, imagine steem without voting. Imagine they just Hard-Forked voting right out of the whole thing altogether.

What's left?

A lot of really awesome stuff, that's what!!

The delegation system is amazing (way better than pa.treon). The steem-token transfer system is amazing (way better than v.enmo or credit-cards or banks). The blogging system is amazing (way better than tw.itter or fa.cebuk). It's all super-awesome!!