"basics the core of capitalism, of business, is the satisfaction of the customer."

Yes, we have to ask ourselves who is the happy customer in our current ecosystem? Is it the content creators who are almost forced to buy votes to get noticed at all, curators who have to go through lot of promoted junk, just normal everyday users who want to find good content but are having trouble doing so or passive SP holders who just want to see their wealth increase with minimal effort possible.

I'd like to see ecosystem where I could actually spend time looking for great authors, reward and interact with them, without feeling that I'm losing out a big time on a rat race to increase our Steem Power or drain fiat out of the system.

Ned said frontends could do UI change, and that's actually something I've been doing with my own little project at https://steemliber.com (work in progress), where I hide all the promoted posts by default in trending feed.
Eventually even if we can't get this change through, I hope to see other frontends as well offer an option to not be blasted by promoted posts only on trending.