Wherever money can be made, there will be an element of gaming the system for personal gain. I think this is somewhat unavoidable.
There are things that can be improved . As you mention the signup. I'd also like to see the 'Communities' feature implemented as a means to enable people to easily navigate to content they like, rather than the current scatter-gun approach to delivering content to users.
Also more focus on other features of Steem beyond the 'making money' element. For example, censorship resistance and it's qualities as a medium of exchange (no fees, three second confirmation).
We understand a little bit of gaming, we followed Google since inception. But keep in mind google engineers were ALWAYS re-writing the algos to eliminate the gaming, thus having better pure search results. Crypto due to it's dispersed leadership has problems doing that. Currencies can be changed very little, but ICOs based on actual businesses (like social networking) require constant adjusting, and thus crypto companies actually have a disadvantage vs companies led by visionary single leaders/ceo/founders.
We'd settle for just some better search, the search is awful on Steemit. We have trouble even finding sports, or worse trying to just find ONE sport only. We don't like English Premiere League, for instance, but you can't get sports in a Steemit feed without it.