I would love to see Steem paying people's bills too, but at the moment it can't. This would have been true for a lot of things in the beginning. Youtube was not immediately profitable for youtubers, Twitter was not either. Nowadays, famous people get $100,000 for a shill tweet...
The overall value of Steem is that it is something that can truly spread across the internet. But honestly, it can't ever make you enormous income from the upvotes unless you become very popular. That popularity is on us, not the Steem blockchain. We have to be interesting enough to people to draw in that kind of attention.
Yes, the popularity is on us, just play around and look for ideas.