I really like this. Its pretty common for a sorta mentor/shoutout hiearchy to form on content sites, but its pretty ad hoc. STEEM lets those higher up directly foster and build those below. Once this site grows to the point where we have a bunch of different niches.

As a theoretical example, say some new experimental music genre ends up getting a community on steem. Once a couple artists get successful, they will turn around and directly benefit up and comers, causing the entire community the develop faster/increase quality/be more successful than if their community ended up on another social media.

One thing I don't see you mention much is why this system will be better for the viewers, not just content creators. Whenever any new media comes along, most social media quickly devolves into a chaotic inconsistent quality mess for a long time before a quality structure emerges good enough for non diehards. Steem will eventually be able to build out consumer ready markets at a much quicker pace. I don't think people realize this solely because most of the whale pool is still mainly investors. Once more high quality content producers reach the top, this site will have a huge transformation.