Ultimately the question we need to ask ourselves is : Do we want to prevent investors from making money? and is there a good and a bad way to make it?
I don't judge this behavior morally - maybe everybody has the right to post 10 minimalistic posts per day and then just upvote them (like @sandrino does) or also his comments.
The question is however what would happen to the Steemit community if everybody starts doing that, because it's the most simple and effective way to earn steem. Will we still see elaborated long articles and communication between the platform users? And in case not, what would that mean for the growth of the community and the Steem price? I fear the consequences would be everything but positive.
If everyone did that, you'd see a race to the bottom in quality. A trend like that wouldn't be so hot for Steemit's reputation. But it is a beta product and it's going to take time to work it out.
Since that kind of activity seems beyond my sphere of control, I'm just going to focus on the content.
I'm afraid I agree.
Also, I applaud you for focusing on the positive (ie. where you can make a difference, authoring).
I hate to make the "snowball effect" argument, but it does seem that Steemit would devolve into a cesspool of circle-jerking that was not much better than a MLM scheme if we were all to maximally exploit the system as "allowed" by the code.