I like that you always scrutinize things in a thoughtful way. Let me think about your points of view an then tell you my personal opinion about the different ideas:

• First of all lets confess that people are different. I personally could normally never write four posts in one day (at least not four articles of a certain quality). I write about 3 to 5 articles per week (if it is not a very stressful week) and that will not change with the newe rules.
  Others may have more time and energy to write more often - I cannot speak for them - but I agree with you that "mass" production of whatever only very rarely leads to high quality ... and more than four articles per day are really a lot!

• Concerning the flowers and the insects I don't mind. Actually I like both, especially the insects. :-) It's just a matter of taste. Maybe you would actually solve four chess problems per day in case I offered that "service". :-)
  Maybe in future it will help that the steemit content will be organized by groups of different topics (the insect group, the chess group, the crypto currency group, the gardening group, the science group, the memes ...): so you will be able to find "your" topics more easily.

• I completely agree with you, that it makes no sense if someone who is followed by many bots creates 10 posts a day and gets automatically rewarded for every of them. I think an upvote should count more if the voter actually opens an article and stays at least 5 minutes on the site (I know it is not so easy to detect who really reads an article, because bots can be programmed to imitate this behavior - one should think about how to detect if a real human was reading an article).

• If one should upvote all posts of ones followers? Of course not: as soon as the number of followers is getting higher that is impossible anyway. I try to spread my votes on many different authors and especially also on new or not so well known steemit users whose content I feel to be undervalued. Some really famous users put an image and add some short text (where most of it just repeats the source without any own thoughts), and within some minutes get 40 - 50 dollar, whereas a newbie may write a really long and creative article and only gets a few cents. I try to balance that a little bit.
  That doesn't mean that I never vote for well paid users: if I like what I see they get my upvotes. If I like a person and want to encourage her, she gets my upvote as well: I am not a robot and my evaluation is subjetive of course, too. But normally I only vote for articles which I did open and read.