BIG thanks for the shout out! This post hit home with me. I love the question of "what are you building?" That's something all steem-folk should ask themselves before clicking "post." It's definitely a question that I've forced myself to confront more seriously / respectfully.
The steemit world is very young... let's invest the time to build it right... ;)
I think it helps more after understanding what Steemit is generally about - it's an entire economic system by itself (thanks to @andrarchy for his lengthy posts on this). Steem is the commodity, backing the currency and there are limited amounts everyday. Posts are essentially nodes to acquire funds from the pool. And @dan at one point designed this to solve the mutual-aid society problem. So yes, building, contribution etc are definitely baked into it, regardless of ease of exploiting the system especially when it comes to botting accounts..