Totally agree with everything you said. I'm seeing Steemit advertisements and people here actively trying to recruit more people, which I think is a huge mistake until more usability improvements can be made to the platform.

As it is right now, it's a complete slog curating content from the "new" section and definitely not worth the payout considering the enormous amount of spam and shit-posts to wade through... and using the tags is a waste of time since it doesn't show you only posts with those tags but a random mix of stuff... arghhh.

And yes, some kind of block function would be great. If I see a user plagiarizing, or consistently posting spam, or generally acting with bad behavior, I really have no interest in seeing anything from those users or giving them one ounce of my attention ever again.