my first post and first impressions of steemit

So this is my first post on here. I just started getting active in Reddit as well, both due to really just trying to converse with people about crypto and how it would eventually pertain to what we do at our firm (lead generation). I am a huge fan of StackOverflow, and so I might be biased as far as what I would be looking for here.

I own a small tech firm with 5 PHP devs, and while we do not build content platforms, we are working in the "content generation" space daily because of the constant SEO and landers produced by our clients, and often time blog management in order to get solid lead gen on a property.

One of the things that seemed to me to be appealing about steemit was it's merging of crypto and content; which in theory seems like a good way to pay for content.

However, after spending the last 15 minutes on here, I'm trying to avoid coming to the following immediate conclusions:

1. This "payout with $" flag on every single post/response... Does that seem like a good idea? If you look at stack overflow, you get a ranking caused by your ability to write good content (from my experience) -- this payout thing... I realize it's part of what drives this site, but is shoving it in the face of everyone on a post making it appear more like money grabbing and going to tilt the content towards click bait type of stuff (ie: writing content just to get read and commented on). In some ways it screams "look how much money I earned" instead of "look how valuable this content is"

2. Am I missing some kind of moderated system where there is a path towards becoming very knowledgable about given tags or is this just a free for all? I see the (75) after people's usernames, but does this indicate activity and can it go down over time if people post bad content?

Hopefully these comments don't come across as negative, but I am just trying to avoid joining a community that appears like it could be headed towards click-bait/facebook-type-content vs stack-overflow-quality-content.