"it is this had led to a large proportion of articles resembling something like high school homework assignments; that are rather short in length, excessively simple and pretty much not worth reading in the eyes of anybody but a high school teacher"
This is so true! That's the problem with a lot of new steemians - they join with dollars in their eyes, but they expect an "A for effort." Unfortunately, in the real world, "A for effort" isn't what happens - you can only earn money here if you make a valid contribution.
New users should focus on: Meeting people in the community, learning to create great content with a consistent theme, and building the value of steem as a whole.
They should not focus on how to maximize value from upvote bots, yet so many new users seem to spend the majority of their steem time trying to generate money from bots... sigh