Spot-on, man! I've been following these fights on and off and although with my current SP I'm not able to improve anything I agree that spam and low quality content is killing this platform... and I also side with you on the expectations that new users have here.
I haven't expected to make 100,000 STEEM myself after first month and the only thing I've been trying to do was posting well-researched content, that I personally identified with to probe my potential.
But there are plagiarised, ridiculous, spammy posts coming from every direction, that get absolutely unjust rewards and I can't say I see a lot of action to combat them or accounts posting them!
To state the obvious, on a decentralised platform such as steemit, where SP is crucial for your influence, the only way to change things is to unite whales wielding it against the abuse. Maybe by delegating the power to a downvote superbot or maybe by caring to upvote and resteem the good content instead of upvoting yourselves.
Well anyway, you're doing great work here, so please don't stop!