Quality exists and will always exist on Steem, because I believe quality producers will still be here.
Maybe I'm wrong in my opinion that overall quality is dropping and will continue to do so. And there's nothing that can be done from Steem level, except acknowledge it and believe the communities + SMTs will offer quality creators a way to continue to produce valuable content, while being rewarded accordingly for it.
At a grander scale we see a trend of the modern society and their level of interest toward quality on other social media platforms. I believe they (i.e. social media), as well as smartphones, are at least partially responsible for the dropping attention span. And thus the avoidance of quality content, which require a deeper level of involvement.