Right, I get what you are saying. On the other hand, it is slightly (or perhaps highly) confusing on Steemit for example that there is Trending and Promoted while actually both are about promotion, just using different means to get attention.
To me it looks like that the whole thing accidentally works somehow just because people are paying bots to promote good things, because who would pay money to promote crap.
Your point is valid, but I don't like that Trending has very little to do with actual content quality. Promoted posts should be simply Promoted. I am not sure it is a good thing that you will never get into Trending without paying quite a lot of money yourself. But surely you can pay for a good article, get followers and then depend on them to vote on your stories.
On the other hand, Trending will probably never be and never was about content quality so much. In the early days it was enough for a single whale to vote on an article and it got there instantly.
But this is a broader issue to think about, how to promote good content, and everybody is thinking about that I guess. A new user can get super frustrated super quickly currently, I can tell you that.
Or perhaps Steem is just mirroring how real world works and there is nothing wrong with it. People with power are using it, people without power can do shit.