I completely agree with your points and I have been surprised by how many people share this view on this platform.
The one thing I would add though is if you take a step back and ignore the rewards completely, I think the platform will gain more momentum and be healthier with more diverse content. One crude way to measure this is by how many people are posting, but this is really hard to get at (bots multiple accounts etc) but I think by looking at groupings and how the groupings of these people are changing over time we can get some insights. I am testing different metrics and cuts of the data to arrive at useful metrics which people will be able to refer to for reliable information on the platform.
I have looked at a few aspects in the last few weeks but there are many more we can use. For example in the working smarter aspect, it would be interesting to look at how networked people are. I'll be doing some analysis of the discord groups, Twitter posts etc to see if there is anything there that we can look at to inform smarter networking.