Right on brother. I'm almost shocked reading all these comments of people that are at 70+ complaining about people further down the Steemit foodchain. They can't seem to realize that there are plenty of people like me that typically can't get more than a few cents per post for honestly great content. Then they are wondering why people end up using bots for a kick upwards. This is not the real problem. This is only the symptom. That they can't see this, leaves me extremely disappointed.

I fully agree that the points you raise above as well as the immature incentive system in Steemit and the inability to filter and track consistently good content is the real issue involved. However, without more whales understanding this rather than just blaming the minnows, I'm not sure how the platform gets changed to solve this.