I have to be honest @gogogadgetupvote. As a minnow, this has been going through my head a lot. To the point I almost wanted to upvote myself to see what it does, since it seems more and more like a 'common practice'. I actually want to thank you for this post, because I want to keep doing on Steemit what I can here to do, create good content. The money aspect is nice, and did influence my decision to come to Steemit, but I still believe that's not the main motivator.

I do believe in karma and don't believe in wasting energy on the negative. They can ruin the platform but they can't ruin you. Say worst case scenario, the abuse the system so much that everybody moves away, they themselves will be stuck with nothing and move on to other places where they can abuse the system. Meanwhile, we continue to built the platform until the rewardpool improves (maybe I'm naive, but I rather built relationships and write content).

As for the issues, I'm dropping this link as input to the 2018 roadmap:
https://steemit.com/roadmap2018/@steemitblog/steemit-roadmap-2018-community-input-requested. They do need to fix this.