When and only when the developers of steemit understands that what matters isn't the amount of payments but the frequency of payments then this platform will attract a whole new wave of users. The lottery analogy kinda works on a small scall but the more users the less sense this lottery thing makes. Most whales are constantly upvoting the same people, some of them are earning $500 to $1000 for every single post they make and of course they are taking advantage of that and posting their 4 daily post per day. This is totally unstustainable, what happens when they inevitably fall back to 10$ per post ? They will stop posting. As OP said it's all about expectations, the noobies expect to earn a lot and will leave when they realize they aren't and the popular authors will also leave when they realize that their work is worth 100 times less than what they are paid today.