The main thing that will change distribution on the platform is inflation into new posts. That's currently going down a little bit every day because it's set in a hardfork. I think it should be 10% and remain there. I put that in a @minnowsupport post about changes to steemit within the last week to get at the root cause of one of your major concerns.
The second is vote buying. Again, I fought these rules. But they are here. Ironically not using vote buying right now on good posts encourages shit posters. So, if you think you make good content you should be using them otherwise the shitposters that use them will have less competition and more to gain.