For me, personally, I need to keep my track record as honest as possible. I could get work outside of this realm and use my blog as a reference to what I'm able to accomplish. If I bought my "salary" here, I wouldn't be able to laugh in the face of a low ball offer. Things like that are important to me. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, right? If someone came here scouting for talent, they would not look at the ones who are purchasing "success". Those folks are shooting themselves in the foot. Really though, it seems they just came for money and blogging or showcasing their talents comes second. That's doing it backwards. They don't know, because they're amateurs.
Anyway, that's just how I see things. People can game the system all they want. It's not everyday a shoplifter walks into a store, announces their name and kindly points out the fact they're about to leave with as much as they can carry. At least we can admire their "honesty."
I get your point, and I agree with everything, or almost everything, but as you said every action has an equal opposite reaction, so at the ends y sums up in a mix of what people are really looking here, and thats how content get spread, and wrote, and curated, and etc. its really hard to surf through steemit and find some interesting articles, not because people are not writing them, there are a lot of people doing amazing things.
At least people are getting more engaged in the comments, and discussing real things, not bot comments, this last pricing high brought a lot of things in here, in a good and a bad way, with their own reactions, thanks to both of those things more people ended up getting to know more about how things were going, or at least I can see that peculiar thing as a positive thing.