well there's a few different issues you've touched on there.
- lack of engagement - Because people are so consumed with earning, and think the way to do this is to make blog posts, they often overlook another good way of earning organically - comments. Add value to somebody's post and you're likely to get attention, if not only from the person that made that post. Yet on a site like reddit, people naturally engage with eachother more there because there's no financial incentive to distract from the community aspect.
you do however end up with all the "good post" comments, which is just crap.
downvote censorship - disagree with a whale, or offend them in some way with your opinion, then you're at risk of that whale taking action with their downvotes and ruining your account rep. A whale can be very offensive and if their holding is big enough, they'll get very little resistance (i posted about this exact topic a week or so ago)
The relationship between voting power and SP - It's one of the core components of steem - and i think it needs to be adjusted. For example - if somebody holds 1000SP - which is not a huge amount by the grand scheme of things, it will take 65 votes with the minimum 15SP delegated to new accounts to equal that one vote. Technically i'm not even a minnow yet and it still takes probably 20 new accounts to equal my 1 vote. So how about people with 10k or 20k SP? is their opinion worth that of 1300 new accounts? or is a 20k SP holder's opinion worth the opinion of 65 people that have been around for a few months and hold 300SP? I'm not against the concept of higher SP resulting in higher voting power, but I believe that somehow the SP - VP return should be diminishing.. I do know that would cause other issues however, ie. the lack of incentive for big money to come into STEEM which would affect the price.
It's a tough formula to get right..