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judging by much of the content I skim through, the hope for income does represent many peoples motivation

Sure! It's a motivation - but not a dependency. How could you depend on something that doesn't exist :) I by myself couldn't make a living of steemit incomes and I am not doing bad here. Maybe in the future it could be like this, but not now. Until then we should focus on building great brands that will payout in the future.
That's at least my point of view 😉

Referring to this

n order to make the rewards more stable and enable users to more reliably predict the amount of rewards they can earn on a day-to-day basis