With the upcoming 'communities'/hivemind, the best thing to put our money into are more curation teams imo. The team I'm with - SteemStem - doesn't provide once a month upvotes, we almost guarantee an upvote if your content meets our standards. If you post every day good stuff, you get money every day (Up to a certain % share of the VP). 

But obviously we are limited to STEM and couldn't possibly apply this to all users on steem. If we had new teams dedicated to Literature, photography, travel, and so forth which whales delegated to, this would become much more applicable in the upcoming communities setup that steemit is building, and writers who want to get paid should become a part of those curation communities. 

And that's the other thing; we have a community of well over 1,000 individuals many of whom engage in our discord community, making it much more than a curation team, but a space for likeminded people. 

This is how the real world works, you network and work with those people who reward your skills and share your interests. 

If somebody just writes a good 300 word post, that's not enough in itself to deserve $25 - that's what wordpress is for. No, an author needs a publisher, an editor, a mentor (we have those too in steemstem), a social media presence and so on to 'get the job'. 

The issue here is that whales won't delegate to them because as you rightly point out - no incentive,  but if there was a system where delegators get a share of the rewards, could be good. But there isn't, so...