For me a good economics for newcomers would be to end the 7 day limit for earning. You could still receive weekly payouts, but you could also still earn more. This would give some hope so that newcomers knew that even if they were not earning much now, once they go up the ladder they could still be rewarded for their past work (meaning the low earning posts they were writing at the present time).
Another thing that I think it would be a good idea is to reward views. This would create incentives for people to actually read the posts and would allow bloggers to earn from people that were not registered on Steemit. This would make bloggers less exposed to eventual flaws of the other economics.
This is actually a great idea. If the payouts were set up to reward "timeless" content rather than just news worthy content then we would have less "here is the current news" type posts. Before they made the change by hard fork the rewards for content lasted 1 month. They switched down to rewarding content only during a 1 week period. If they stretched the period back to 1 month the quality of content would for sure improve and if they made it without limit then it would improve much more, but again the issue is the economics were switched to favor short news report style posting.