While I do see a lot of spamming and copy pasta, I don't see those posts making a lot of money. They are a problem, I agree, but to me, the bigger problem is that you always see the same authors on the trending pages. Always. And when you look into their content it is usually good, but certainly not as good as some of the stuff you've read in the lower reaches of the category. The problem is that you, as a single curator, have no effective means of bringing that obscure post to the top.
I think we should explore a change to the algorithms used to determine the trending and hot categories...or even have steemit default to new, rather than trending. That's my thoughts based solely on my own experience which deals mostly with the poetry section.