I agree with you. As a content consumer the value of steemit depends on the quality of its content. As a content producer the value of steemit only matters if the rewards depend on quality of content produced. That quality has intrinsic and extrinsic components, or perhaps we might say objective and subjective components. Objective may be the originality of the post, how well  content meets a certain information goal, etc. Subjective includes people's interest and feeling of the content, as well as temporal aspects, since some information is quite valuable only at certain times. However, if the economic incentives are such that we can treat content as a black box and the only factors for upvotes and rewards are how much someone can make from that black box, then content quality is irrelevant and the platform suffers, at least as a serious platform for content. It can still however, be a good platform for treating content as tokens, where the value of those tokens are based on factors such as how much power is behind the poster and the groups who will automatically upvote the token.  As I learn more about Steemit, I am constantly reminded of my favorite Hayek quote: "The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design." (From Hayek's "The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism")