Personally I believe the root cause is that the reward pool is vastly oversized for the ability of the community to generate real value-added contributions

Is this something the backend of Hive is intended to solve? We management at steemSTEM are working on our own frontend that I hope, if time and funding permits, revolutionizes the way academic research gets published and accessed - and in the spirit of social media, reconnects science with the masses. If we and others can simply and quickly build our own Dscience or whatevers with ease, it'd lead to more 'usefully rewarded' content that would also bring investors' eyes toward the blockchain, so I'm pretty excited for the day when these things are easy to implement.

(2am, can't tell if I'm making any sense, soz)