Great thoughtful post, thanks for sharing. I too have similar worries about Steemian's 'get-rich quick' mentality. They will not reap the reward this platform will offer in the future.
At Steemit's core, I think it's about educating each other, through each other's differing experiences and skillsets.
It's like scaling the sharing economy in the form of curated information.
They are already aware of the copyright problem, and have original 'works' bots crawling the pages. But this is far from perfect. I believe that the people who put in the real time, effort, and energy into creating a valuable piece of work will be rewarded in the end. It's too soon to tell, but things are definitely changing. As a society, we need to reevaluate what we deem purposeful.