I hope not to scare you with this long comment. :) I have no resistance towards your points raised and refer also towards what I read in the comment-section.
For a view from another angle it probably looks like this in the Steemosphere:
People try by all means to persuade other people to behave according to a system that revolves around the currency "attention". The attention span has reached a strange degree at which it is fleeting. When we talk about incentives, we are talking about behavioural adaptations that often unconsciously put people under pressure. The 7-day window, the VP wheel, which should always show exhaustion at the end of the day if one wants to be considered a good Steemian, the distribution of the curation rewards after how many minutes. We treat each other as if we have already accepted that a system that offers mathematical and economic mechanisms must be used in exactly this way, although of course we could behave differently. I see it similarly to you.
I think that in a system where a single actor unites all functions in one function, it will not have an inspiring attraction, but the opposite. The participants will become all the more frustrated, the more adjustments the system requires of them in terms of quantitative participation.
Contents are, as it were, nothing more than mathematical quantities; they are basically not really important in this system, because they are fed by all means into automatisms that oil a mindless computational equation. On the surface a content seems to be welcome, but below it the nature of the platform offers numbers.
Has it ever happened to you (who might read this) that you happened to stumble across a "whale" account and you see that this account doesn't publish comments or replies, but is a silent account that just votes? Did you have the impulse that this anonymous person should please be approachable?
The thing is: A whale shouldn't and can't represent everything in one function. When he starts a community, he is prone to corruption and nepotism. It's human nature to gain advantages by making friends with someone in a position of power. When account holders and community founders make their debut in a position as strong as a whale, and promise to reward good content and punish bad content, one is acting like a monarch. One doesn't distribute ones power to independent institutions, but bundle it centrally. If one does this, one will attract both: Flatterers, opportunists and lobbyists as well as opponents and haters.
You can start with the very best intentions and I'm sure whoever founds communities has only the best in mind. But thousands of years of human civilization history has shown that the most powerful don't see their own stumbling blocks. Which consultant can you trust, who will ask you critical questions that you, because you want to be mature in spirit, do not regard as a violation of your vanity?
The basic idea of a healthy system is the division of powers. Those who belong to the three different pillars are not allowed to have backroom conversations, they must offer voluntary transparency and reporting to the public. They have a liability to bring.
Those who want to make rules must have the mandate of those who consider themselves to belong to this rules. There is a lot of confusion about this here on Steemit, and while you are an enthusiastic supporter of Community A today, you can turn your back indignantly on it tomorrow. The same goes for the curators: today a content producer is celebrated and tomorrow he can fall into disgrace. Nobody likes that, actually. Every one would like to have at least some sort of certainty. But here it's more about the person than the content.
So the community drivers, like the individual users, are not really committed to each other. As soon as an individual criticizes a community (driver), it is defended by lobbyists and the self-interests of other actors as if it needed to be defended. Small accounts stand in front and defend large accounts, as they sense an opportunity to profile themselves.
Where content like firewood is used to light a campfire, but almost nobody sits around it in a circle to hear good stories, we have an absurd system. We have seen on facebook that the individual has basically become a sort of pass-through station to forward this or that content. I think though that the local or small groups see themselves as valuable and do their thing without caring much about likes or dislikes.
My attitude is that not a single one should care about the "masses to be brought in". They would come all by themselves if they found fun, interest and inspiration. It is rather the other way around and I would like to close with the paradox that this could be: Never try to help the weak or please the strong.
You are describing how things partly are ... But how could we improve STEEM in your opinion, what would be the best possible measures? :)