First of all, thank you for promoting my ebook, you are the first to do so and that is amazing :D
Thank you for the in-depth analysis of the steem ecosystem economic dynamic. I would like to add to this the power of goal-oriented communities.
I believe that one of the key points of the steem blockchain is the power to incentivize certain types of behaviour without going into your own pocket. I am not an economist, but I believe that this is the only economic system where this happens and is feasible at a large level. And this is something we need to leverage to the max in order to increase the value of the whole ecosystem and subsequently of steem. I believe that @utopian-io and @steemstem are on the way of doing this, exporting content and solutions that brings value to the ecosystem.
Maybe we need to create a goal-oriented community that has the purpose of raising the value of steem and your idea of making sure that good content lands on the trending page can be done fairly decent with a coalition of 6-7 million SP. A curation trail that has the goal of promoting 2-3 articles per day to the trending page can be created so that the curation rewards still go to the original SP holders, which is much easier than getting delegations worth millions of SP. We would need to outline a clear strategy for content that is valuable to the ecosystem and maybe we can also coagulate that content in a separate condenser which does not have the problems which steemit has and we can use the money generated from adds to further promote the steem ecosystem. This would be a project in which I would gladly be involved :)
Can't wait to hear your thoughts on this :)
Doing what you propose requires effort - quite significant amounts of effort from many people. In order to get enough people "rowing in the same direction" there are basically 2 ways:
My hunch is that if it could have worked, it would have already been done. It's a good idea that is probably not doable ... But maybe I'm too pessimistic ...