It all sounds very good, but I think the reason most people are here is still to earn some cash. If you just want to blog and have people read your stories, there are bigger platforms to publish on.
Most people are just playing nice, because they want that upvote.

I can't count the number of people that comment "upvote me and I'll upvote you" or "great post, I really like it" anymore. Or the people that end their comment with : "I'm following you" in the hope that you'll respond or follow back.....

And then there are the professional scammers: people that have 1000's of accounts or bots. Some even downvote others for curation: check out @nixthehammer's account for instance. He quit Steemit recently because of harrasment.

There's also people that plagiarize and still get away with it and others that are blacklisted without apparent reason: check out @elenasteem for instance.

And let's not forget the people that upload an unoriginal post every 30 minutes or so. @izbing is a good example of these.

I agree that authenticity should win in the end, but Steemit is a long way from perfection imo.