I hear you but to be honest the $ shouldn't be your focus when it comes to a social network platform, it should be a nice bonus at best. Again I fully understand where you are coming from and yes the Steemit platform could have some improvements done to help fix the issues somewhat (make it so you can't upvote yourself, or you can't buy/trade upvotes, or remove bots and make everything manual, or limit the # of votes a person can get from the same user in a set period of time...), but again you shouldn't be posting stuff with the expectation of financial gains. If you post a comment on a Wall Street Journal article do you get paid? No. If you start a YouTube Channel and have almost no following do you get paid? No. If you write a 2 hour post on Facebook for your family and friends do you get paid? No. What about a detailed breakdown of something you post on Reddit? Paid? No.

Anyways, although I agree with most of your points and agree it can get frustrating, I think the real issue comes from peoples high expectations that if someone else can get $500 a post then so can I, or that if someone can get $500 from a low effort post then I surely can get $5000 from a high effort post right? But I hate to tell you that usually isn't the case so don't have such high expectations and don't cry that's unfair at every turn, because I hate to tell you but life usually isn't fair and that isn't something that is going to change any time soon for the most part. I have had decent success in life taking the outlook that everything I do is going to be the most uphill battle possible, and instead of getting defeated or seeing it as a reason not to be motivated, I flip it around and see it as a challenge, test things out constantly, try to do better tomorrow then I did yesterday, and basically just grind it out until I reach the point where I feel satisfied with my actions. Too each his own I guess...