This is a great post... I do think there is a huge issue with whales getting their posts high above all the "minnows" even when their content isn't nearly as good sometimes.
"One idea I had was to input an additional number to each post, a quality score, sort of like the reputation score on everyone's accounts."
I really really really like this idea and haven't heard anyone else talk about it... A quality score on posts would be a godsend and I think if we can get more people talking about it, it could actually be implemented.
I'm trying to do my part by upvoting any high quality content I come accross and my readers are doing a great job sharing content with me for this purpose. If you find/author any high-quality posts, don't hesitate to get in touch with me via comment or tag and I'll upvote every time. I think this is a real issue with steem and we need to work on it for mass adoption to be practical. Thanks for sharing this!
Really appreciate it man, steemit needs more people like yourself that actually care about its future rather than only caring about maximizing their short term payouts. I will post in the near future a continuation of this post and be more specific on what I think could be implemented. All of this sounds great but actually getting ideas like this out there and finding out if it is actually feasible will not be easy. Also thanks for up-voting some other comments, it is unfortunate i can't reward people who engage on my posts since i have no steem power but i will hopefully build that up soon.