Good article, good ideas. But if i may, i'd like to ask:
If the purpose is to bring in successful content creators and make them stay on steem, shouldn't they be also rewarded for traffic, views, and readership generated from outside the community?
If a content on steemit goes viral on many of the other social media, gets shared here and there, and generates lots of views from non-members and probably from people who had never heard of steemit shouldn't authors expect some reward for that? On their own blog they monetize that traffic through adds, referrals, etc...
Even if an external viewer gets interested and decided to join the community to upvote, she has to wait for her new account to be validated, and most probably by then she would have already forgotten about the article that brought her here in the first place.