Your analysis is-- sadly-- spot on.
About a month ago, I decided to give this place a try because it looked like it had promise, at least "on paper." I'm a writer, blogger and content creator... the rewards and the whole "alt. economy" and cryptocurrency thing was an interesting and nice fringe benefit.
I would suspect a fair number of the so-called Whales are really good at blockchain and they are probably really good developers, too. What they know about running a company and building community remains to be seen... for me, there's an inherent dichotomy at work, namely that the blockchain structure is all about decentralization (APART-ness) which community is all about TOGETHER-ness. It's a nifty idea to wrap a social platform around a blockchain structure... but how does one execute that?
As for quality original content... it seems a lot of people (myself included) are somewhat sitting on the fence, as far as recommending this to others. I know a dozen people whose "alternative" views would make this a perfect fit, and they could bring their thousands of followers with... but I feel hesitant to stake my reputation on recommending (or pitching) something that seems a bit dodgy.
Anyway, welcome to Steemit!
Well said, many feel that way for sure. It would be high time to get some of that community on here.
If we can actually act out in a "decentralized" platform. I can see the appeal, but for my time on here, things have went from bad to worse :|, sure they were great, but then we got a boom and a bust, everybody had their dreams shattered and most left. And we have things trailing off until about now.
So unless there is a change in pattern, I'm not sure how long authors will go on getting some of that inflation for their daily creativity.
And curators and readers that get 0.001% of the rewards because they have nothing to stake, it seems a bit of a let down, no community, no connections, no decentralization, well what is the point :D