Agreed! When I see someone's blog dominated by other people's content, no matter how good it is it makes me disinterested in them. I pour my heart into my content and am really glad any time I get resteemed, but if someone is on here to just repeat things others say as a way to speak for themselves it totally turns me off. This whole website is still in beta test so hopefully the creators are seeing this and making proper adjustments for the official launch(date, anybody?) And unfortunately this is one relatively small problem compared to the huge abuses going on that I am just scratching the surface on. Again when I spend hours of my time and soul to produce a piece I am proud of and then I see utter garbage and nonsense raking in cash it is discouraging to say the least. Hopefully my circles will continue to grow and create value and get rewarded and recognized. Just gotta keep steeming ahead!
Regarding what posts make money, there are still quite a few kinks that need to be ironed out with how the rewards pool is distributed.
I've used voting bots in certain circumstances, but some people are outright abusing the privilege and corrupting the quality of content that's on the trending page. I'm hoping that the release of SMT's and communities feature will reduce this part of the platform. In terms of when a full release will occur...that's a great question. I'm wondering if they should be concerned about an EOS social networking competitor and if that will push them to go full steem ahead with a more concerted push.