I agree with allot of what you said but I think its still possible to turn it all around. The main problem with the current vote system is Greed and sadly that's a human trait that just isn't going to go away.
#newsteem tries/claims to fight abuse but it looks like they're attempting to from the bottom up. Abuse needs to be fixed at the top and trickle down. One whale abusing the system is allot worse than 100's of minnows doing so.
All in all I don't let downvotes bother me and as you said the blockchain itself is great as proven by whats been built on it so far. So for that reason alone I plan on to continue earning STEEM via creating content and I will ignore all the other stuff because there's jack a person can do about it anyways unless said person has a massive amount of Steem.