I couldn't agree more.
I joined to improve my writing skills, but I very quickly got sucked into the community; and with that the wanting to make a couple of cents from the posts I'm doing.
It does get annoying to watch memes make thousands of times what I made on a post that took me an hour to write. But what really annoys me most is that I generally make 0.02-0.09 cents per post regardless of the quality - which really discourages me from writing long, quality posts.
I guess I'm just holding out hope that my audience will grow, although I have no expectations of a second income from steemit.