Perhaps, it is time to add a third source of rewarding steem together with authoring, up-voting and mining: refering (or blockchain internal linking). It shouldn't be very dificult to implement: Users and posts refered as hyperlink within  the article's text could automaically get a proporcional part of the generated rewards.

He just fucking got you, its just a matter of time before we get rid of explotative people like you stellabelle, just a matter of time, people are waking up to the fact you are nothing but a vampire.

Glad to see this discussion is happening - was starting to think I was the only one who was worried about this. @stellabelle, @pfunk and all - please have a look at my recent posts related to the topic of the Featured Author trend. They haven't gained much traction and I'm not sure how else to bring them to your attention, so here they are:

https://steemit.com/steemit/@nonlinearone/is-steemit-com-turning-into-federated-media 

https://steemit.com/steemit-future/@nonlinearone/was-the-featured-author-trend-caused-by-the-reduction-of-curation-awards-in-july 

https://steemit.com/steemit/@nonlinearone/why-i-gave-the-free-money-usd26-087-from-a-featured-author-post-back  <--- please see @strangerarray's comment on *being* a featured author here also.