Well, you are making some assumptions about who the 1% of accounts that get 99% of author rewards are, and why they are getting those rewards that isn't necessarily supported by data.

There are tricks that suck the maximum rewards from the rewards pool, and these accounts demonstrably are gaming the system better than anyone else. They time their votes, vote on posts they are sure will trend well, and otherwise vote so as to maximize their financial benefit.

This has ZERO relation to quality content.

I have no problem with people that make $1000's per post - as long as they are being upvoted because of the content they publish, rather than how much money they have.

That isn't currently the case, and Steemit is not going to benefit from such games. Those tricks degrade the quality of content on the platform, and piss people off, because people, like many other species do, strongly believe in fairness, and the system isn't fair.

I like Steemit. I like the people, and the civil quality of discourse. I don't want it to fail suddenly because people serially bail once they learn they can't just suck up to whales and get rich like them. That's what happened last July, before I came aboard, or so I'm told, and it will probably happen again soon, as the bolus of new accounts digest the facts about why they are making pennies per post, and rich people make $1000's, and they will never, ever, ever be able to.

I don't care about the money. I work for a living, and am gonna do well enough to die old from that. But I do care, about the fairness, and about good writing, and good reporting. I think that's what the rhetoric about Steemit also suggests it is supposed to do, not provide games that rich people can use to get richer than us, that we can't.