You bring up a very good point here. One of the biggest issues with the steem echosystem right now is that there is more creators than users who are here to consume content. What happens is you end up having an insane amount of low quality content being posted everyday, burrying the good ones in the process.
If there was more influencial creators on the platform to bring in a huge following, that would certainly fix part of the problem. But still I'm curious to hear what people think should be done to change the way the public perceives the platform. After all you can't decide how the general public is going to use it. So the best we/they can do is come up with ways to promote a healthy echosystem and something that's viable long term.
Pardon my negativity, but I'm one of those whiner who liked to stir shit up. In my opinion, we just gotta get used to low expectation. I have learned to live with low payout and sometimes when I share something does not belong to myself, I would hit the decline payout button. Any social media platform that pays, would be heavily swamp with abuser trying to cut an easy way out. We seen enough circle jerker around, what left here are mostly some small time community to help supporting the smaller pond of plankton. Even that, got heavily abused by new comer. In the end, it's about delegate to the team, the team go stronger and return you a bigger upvote. That's all about it. Don't get me wrong, I'm just saying even a small community support is still an effort. But we can't deny that it's a smaller scale version of circle jerking.