A response to your thoughts on the future of Steem

Steem isn't only Steemit. You can take the Steem source code and build your "nerd preferenced" educational style Steem site where people exclusively make educational or academic content. Nothing stops you and your friends from doing that so why not do that and add value to Steem and forget about Steemit?
Your voting power is based on Steem Power. I call Steem Power Freedom Points. If you don't like how content on Steemit is ranked then you should buy more voting power by purchasing or earning Steem Power (Freedom Points). Complaining is fine and it's noted but if you want to do something about it you can just buy more Steem Power.

The preferences of the curators who hold the most Steem Power determines the daily or hourly focus. Perhaps the dashboard could be better organized into different channels. Perhaps this problem can be solved with a better user interface. This doesn't mean that because you think a certain category of content is not high quality that your preferences are somehow the gold standard. Another person such as myself might really find value in travel experiences of others. The female perspective to another person might be really valuable and we might take time to try to understand that perspective.

So in short, stop judging other people's content and put more effort into producing content. If your content isn't being voted up then either it's just not that good, or there needs to be more curation in which case the only way to have that is to buy as much Steem as you can at cheap and power it up. If you want better curation of content then buy Steem Power and curate rather than focusing only on generating content, else you can wait while the current content generating title holders retire and become whale curators in which case it might not be the best idea to diss their content by acting as if not much effort was put into it.

I think your post was genuine so I voted you up but we expect a lot of FUD to come as people who own traditional social media sites begin to feel threatened. Reddit and others are going to do everything they can to try to downplay the success of Steem but in my opinion it's not going to stop it. They'll have to buy Steem Power if they want their flavor of content or their slant.