Hey, @ddrfr33k.
re: didn't expect an essay...
I've been meaning to put together a post about this very thing, and even thought about clicking the box to have my answer become that post, but decided against it because it wasn't actually doing all I wanted it to do. Besides, there's been enough bantering back and forth, I'm afraid anything I say would be lost in the shuffle, since I simply don't have the network or platform that others have.
However, I ended up with some ideas in the process of answering the question that I didn't have going in, so maybe if I do an actual post, it will help round it out more.
In my mind, people are finding the every day tasks of posting, commenting and curating to be too mundane, beneath them, too hard, or too something. It's true that you're not going to get multiple hundreds to a thousand percent returns by doing this, but for the vast majority of us, renting delegation or trying to vote up our stuff through bidbots isn't going to help much, anyway. You have to have money to make money still holds true here to a great degree, and so those who have it will still make the most.
I actually liked tarazkp's post about locked SP. I'm not sure I completely get it yet, but it sounds more promising than a lot of things, including giving consumers more of the reward pool/content pie.