Hive and Steem are based on anarcho principles and to me, that means 'let the market decide' when it comes to economic systems. In that sense, I don't find it really natural or healthy for groups to be imposing their own rules on the free flow of economic activity. Actually, this kind of thing seems to always follow the same patterns/results - which mirror government/corporate control. There really is only 'anarchy' and 'not anarchy' - with staying in anarchy being somewhat of a challenge. It would be so great if the community agreed on things like this and decided to aim to stick more to anarchy - even just as an experiment. This doesn't mean the reward pool is totally open for abuse - if anything it means more engagement from a decentralised community who use their own downvotes in a manual way to address problems in realtime. Automation can be agreed upon, perhaps based on transparent smart contracts to remove totally blatant spam, or maybe not.
The other issues is the decentralisation of the token itself. Originally, Steem had a plan to decentralise the tokens as they saw this as necessary for Steem to meet it's destiny as a decentralised system. Then stupid crap happened and they never delivered on their claimed vision (maybe it was a lie all along). Anyway, we don't seem to have a real vision regarding the decentralisation of the token at the moment and the net result of that is that the biggest holders simply do whatever they can (within the PR vision they create for themself to justify their actions) to try to not let the token precipitate outwards.
We have, on the one hand, Marky complaining that there aren't enough (subjectively) good posts to upvote so he then upvotes software projects instead that can help Hive.. but at the same time we have many people complaining and leaving because they feel abused by the heavy downvoting and lack of respect/coherence in that process. The two things are connected - a lack of 'good' posts to upvote is due to a lack of people wanting to invest time into a system that is overly centralised and overly able to create feelings of disempowerment in content creators who feel they have an ever growing range of options online and don't really feel a need to get stuck in the Hive box.
Tech systems are human systems before they are tech systems, so a failure to respect and empathise with the humans involved in such a social system will always lead to system failure eventually. We need a shared vision among key stakeholders that respects personal will. We lack that currently.