I was thinking of buying some Steem myself and powering up as it seems like that is the only way to get noticed and upvoted, but decided against it.
I agree with most of your points. I think the idea of Steemit is great, but until they employ some kind of quality filter you are going to see some of the great content written my minnows go under the radar and not be rewarded. At the same time you are going to see really lazy, one sentence posts or unfunny memes being heavily rewarded just because they are written by whales.
The idea of multiple accounts where whales delegate their SP to another of their accounts and then upvote their original account also needs to be addressed. That should be easily fixed because you can see where people have been sending SP to their multiple accounts and then upvoting their original account from these multiple accounts and making a shit load of money by curation.
@gingerjack I love the idea of the platform too. I make @youtube videos everyday, and most of those days I put the content here on @steemit as well. I was getting more views from Youtube, when I had no subscribers then I am on @steemit with 40 subs.
Yes the idea is good, but when I spend over $500 for SP and less then a month later is worth less then $250, it just shows that this platform is not for new people to make money, it's for new people to bring in new money for the @whales to be able to make it.
Plus they get all of the new coins that are "minted/mined" everyday, not letting any of the newbies get anything. Again it's a great idea for a platform, but they haven't fixed all of the issues. Just a couple of months ago the whole platform almost when down because it was even worse. They did something to "even out the play" a bit, but there's still so much power in the hands of the @whales that to make the changes needed to make it a worth platform would mean they would have to fork the coin and launch a whole new platform.
But until it gets big enough to capture enough attention, I don't know if there will be a competitor.