Thanks for your reply and the interesting thoughts @soykatonline. I do agree with you that the reward system needs to be sustainable and incentivize the production of new content on a regular basis. I think the steem reward system is doing that just fine. I just think that it is a major shortcoming that high quality content does not get rewarded in the long term, while medium quality content sometimes gets higher rewards. This sometimes depends on the reputation of the author, which is a different topic (I do think that the reputation system on steemit is quite sophisticated, by the way).

I personally do see great promise in platforms like www.wildspark.me which seem to encourage value distribution over a longer term period. Once you generate a wildspark link, you keep profiting from people sharing the content. I actually think that this would be very interesting to combine with steem - you could use wildspark links to curate content on steem. However, at the moment, this is technically not possible.

I do like your idea of introducing a royalties-like structure, I will have to think about that :) sounds good!

The 3.5 day policy by @grumpycat that I mentioned earlier is about a new policy that upvote bots are not allowed to sell upvotes on posts older than 3.5 days, otherwise it will get severely downvoted by Grumpycat. It seems like @grumpycat is some sort of "bad cop" on steemit, enforcing the more controversial policies that prevent behavior that hurts the platform in the long run :) check the article I linked above for further infos.