Thanks for the read Skum.

Yeah I've been trying to look at some of the basic machinery and economics, but that doesn't even cover the issues you're bringing up here. There's an incentive to up vote popular authors b/c of the curation rewards.

I know there's a Robin Hood project where people are pooling steem to power up and reward lesser known authors. So maybe people are recognizing these issues and will be able to develop solutions. I'm not sure it will be enough though.