But who's to judge?

The curators. That's how this system was designed.

Many people like spam. channels and tabloid rags are the perfect example of this.

Well we could always preserve the non-winners, simply don't pay them, and allow them to be posted on spam websites for those failed starts. We could call it steemit-rejects.com

Unless elitist is what we want to be, of course.

Of course not. We just need to find a healthy point. I don't think we're there yet.

Right now the healthy part is being hidden by the constant spam. We need a tweak.