the quality of content on Steemit is incredible
Is it the quality of intellectualism and prose, or predominantly the quality that the content matches your interests?
Here, people have to make content which is truly engaging
Engaging as in much discussion and spawning communities of like interests? Or appealing to the site-wide most prevalent desires the voter has to upvote if the post games some emotional need the voters have, such as the desire to get others to promote certain causes, the male desire to see girls show their boobs, the "Steem will change the world" meme, etc..
I agree with the premise of content quality finding its worth in votes
I'm skeptical for the reasons above.
Both. The assumption in your question seems to be that there is some kind of problem with finding a niche, or having a site that's more popular with certain types of people. There isn't. Actually, that's a good thing, because it helps something become popular faster, and more of those types of people will want to join.
Nevertheless, the range of content on Steemit is also quite wide. People write here talking about art, philosophy, psychology, anarchy, personal secrets, economics. If you really think it's so limited, perhaps you'd like me to link you to a few things which demonstrate the diversity.
Churdtzu your blog posts are an example of that diversity, and your consistent payouts probably reflect that - one of the next things I plan to do is read more of your posts and see what I can learn because you are clearly doing a bunch of stuff right on Steemit!
Thanks @sift666, much appreciated.
It would be a problem if that "Western tinfoil hat, hippie/druggie, nerd backslapping while extracting $ from the collective TO DA MOON" niche is too small to scale the merchant ecosystem that they are relying on to create enough demand for Steem tokens so that we can afford to pay bloggers without imploding the value of the tokens.
I am not interested to read about someone peering at their navel, which is how I characterize most of the content on Steem.
I am reading a lot of it everyday, it is nearly all amateurish crap that I wouldn't read if I wasn't investigating Steem. The great bloggers stand far above, and I read them only when I need to, because they have something important to say. I don't have time to whirl away browsing amateurish blogs daily for entertainment.