It depends , whether steemit is trying to reach out to the Everyday reader where content are freely shared and read, versus the altruistic notion where content has to be original. I suspect the former. But I agreed , the voting algorithm has to be tweak to encourage original contents.
I belong to the Everyday reader group. I don't post much , but spend time on steemit reading interesting stuffs be it original or not, and up voting those I like. Somewhat like a Wikipedia surfer.
No idea, really. Agree that there are different steemit users. But to encourage user usage at steemit platform which is a get paid to post platform, a certain level of quality in content must be maintained. Otherwise, it will just become a spammy network like tsu which have shut down.
See here https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/16/spammy-social-network-tsu-shuts-down/