hi @centaurmystic,

In the end it yours was one of the comments that answered most to the spec's of the prize so I could not leave yours out ;) .

the whole steemit.com ecology needs to grow still and develop. There are good tools, and no doubt others that will die off. I think the feed system is one of those.

There should be a way to filter the feed to your preferences, say for tags, keywords, author combinations etc.
https://beta.chainbb.com is better for finding good content I believe.

I think that quality will win out in the end. So I am not too worried that the cat video type posts are winning the battle at the moment, that is a bit of an anomaly of the beginning.

I see a lot of willingness from the dev's to pull the various levers at their disposal and see what happens.

One aspect an author on steemit.com should also keep in mind is google juice. Once the platform breaks through, a portfolio of quality posts I think should help a lot to build a following.
Since steemit.com's rank as a website is higher ranked, posts on it will have better SEO.

If you are gaming the system with posts that game the upvoting system, yeah that might gather a few bucks but long-term it will be (hopefully) easily be drowned out.