thanks for sharing this valuable opinion. I agree everything you said and to some extent, I was/am in a similar situation like yours but not to the point that I would come out and say that I don't need big votes though! :)
people's satisfaction from writing comes from social recognition (views/comments) and facebook nails it to achieve its current success. Steemit comes with an extra motive - rewards, but it changes everything. people start to care how much they 'earn' and not only that, they start to care how much 'others' earn. without rewards, steemit is hardly anything new (not many people need their blogs blockchain-saved).
You may imagine what will happen if a company decides to fully disclose all its employees' salaries. "Why is he getting so much more than me? I did all the work!!" The company will fall apart. So, given that example, I think Steemit is doing alright, but still far from functioning well as this issue is something totally new. But again, I am not sure if this is only a lucky result because of a vibrant community (though decreasing) or if the inc. really try hard to tackle this issue. I would guess the former.
As an active user for quite some time, I find myself impossible to read a lot of posts, sometimes not even a few. So, IMHO, a good partitioning of the whole community will help, so people can have their limited attention within a limited range so we can build a lot of smaller and healthier sub-communities on top of this conceptually unified community, instead of just a single and huge steemit community where people's jealousy, frustration, disgruntle... spread wide and fast.
Thanks for sharing again and look forward to your new style. :)