In a way I can totally understand your point, but I don't think it's as difficult for "minnows" to become "dolphins" if they decide to work hard.

The reason why I say this is because I just joined 4 days ago and I am doing pretty well. I have written 3 articles so far, and the second one got picked up by Project Curie and it really helped to raise my reputation quite a few points.

Now, I'm a firm believer in producing my own original content and injecting my own personality, and maybe that's why I was rewarded on my second post.

And, while it only made around $24, I thought that was pretty good for a second offering. I was a little disheartened at first, however, when I put a lot of work into my first post and it only got 3 votes. My third post didn't do as well as I'd hoped, either, garnering only 17 votes.

I do agree with you 100%, though, on the point you made about people doing the complete "copy & paste" thing and basically plagiarizing. There are a lot of people doing it, and it's actually quite shocking.

If anything, this is what is causing people to jump ship. Another big issue, in my opinion, is the post editor is quite difficult to use. SteemIt needs to do much better when it comes to that. It shouldn't be that difficult to integrate a decent WYSIWYG editor into the site.

Overall, I like your style. You don't pull any punches and I respect that.