This "economy" is not flawed. It works exactly as it was designed to. I think the problem you're having is ideological rather that economic. If you read the white paper closely you'll realize that Steemit is 100% capitalistic. I mean 100%. That's more capitalism than any other so called capitalistic economy known in the world. In the U.S. economy we have a fair amount of socialism. Many services are subsidized by the government in order to equalize the playing field. Ned Scott had no such intentions for Steemit. It's 100% either you have money to invest or you don't. The more money you invest the more money you will make. The only guarantee that a potential investor has that they will get a decent ROI is self upvoting. so long as Ned Scott is driving the ideology behind the development of the Steem blockchain, this will remain the same. Self upvoting is at the heart of how Steemit works and it's not going away.

As an alternative to self upvoting, I created SteemAX via @learnelectronics. I'd recommend taking a quick look at my article in which I propose that disproportional vote exchanges are not only more profitable, they're more ethical. Creating the ability to trade votes is the same as creating an open market, a capitalistic concept, whereby the one and only good in this system, STEEM, can be traded at different ratios. However, what's really being traded isn't STEEM, but faith in each other's quality. A disproprtional exchange of upvotes not only creates better ROI than self upvoting for the one on the good side of the ratio, it creates a much better opportunity for a whale to get a larger share of the curation reward as well as a small return on their upvote value. However, this only works out for both parties if they post quality content others also want to upvote. Just getting into a single exchange requires the two parties interact, which is more than can be said for bid bots, self upvoting, vote farming, etc.