The truth is always a bitter pill to swallow. So many people here do not want to create a unique content. This is why there are so few new tags; everybody is following the white light, no one is looking about the crountryside.
As you said, most are here for the money. I joined steemit for the money. That was the first thing that caught my attention when I was being introduced to the platform and it still remains the platform's selling point. I see this as one of the reasons why there's this inability to break away from laid down patterns of success here.
In the movie, Three Idiots, the major character said;
Pursue excellence and success will follow you pants down.
I have never forgotten those words. To be excellent means to stand outside the box, be different, be unique. But are we here on steemit?
Everybody writes fascimile of posts that had probably gotten a curation or had been visited by a whale forgetting that whoever wrote the post in the first place wrote it from someone within him or her. We have forgotten that writing like fingerprints are unique and no matter how well we imitate another writer, we can never give the same result as that writer.
What then is the solution to this problem? Do we turn away from those who had made financial success on steemit and find our own heroes? Do we break away from the mould and create our own gods?
This is a larger problem. What has value and what we place our wealth into are too often two very different things.
If there was a god, it cannot save us as it would not be its way. Creating an illusory god from the minds of man may offer comfort but, the help it brings is as illusory as the creation itself.
And that is another problem. Steemit is like a prophet preaching peace with a gun in hand. If not for curation, and certain well meaning individuals who look for quality content to upvote, the quality content that steemit wants to pride itself for will be mainly hidden. After upvotes can be bought for any post, no matter how trashy it may seem. Votes can be exchanged, votes can be bidded for. With all these, what is the motivation to write well?
Value hides behind wealth in the scheme of things and those with the wealth, not those who write well, are valued here. At the end of the day, it is all about making money; The rules are not sacrosanct. They have been bent and no one is bothered. But it's open-source so what the hell?