quality (of any kind) will always be in the minority, which is what makes it valuable.

I agree, but is quality on Steem actually being given the value that it is worth? I'd argue that the answer is "no" more often than "yes". Which is why I say that the incentive does not yet exist.

I think that communities will help with this a lot as they have the chance to onboard people directly into where their interests lay, instead of a content soup.

I just read a post from @paulag that indicated communities have quite a long way to go before they are to be considered the "solution". Based on her comments, it appears that communities have far missed the basic mark of what might have been expected in any sort of "first launch".

The fact that P2P direct messaging is not available in a community is a severe oversight from my perspective. Sure, I'm cherry picking a flaw, but communities have been discussed for years and that's something that I feel
that most people would have thought to add-in from the start.

I'm not trying to be negative, it's just disappointing to see such massive potential get floundered so often. It's like Steem never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity... Hopefully someone figures it all out for Steem soon, or Steem will quickly be replaced by the competitor who saw epic failure after epic failure on Steem and decided to make their own (better) solution.

Again, I'm still on the Steem Train.. I just need to see more success. It's been a long road of "the next big thing is coming in 3 months!" followed by "the next big thing is coming in 3 months!" and when it finally arrives, another 3 months later, the blockchain crashes for 90%+ of users for 3 days..