Great post, and I fully agree the rewards are not making a whole lot of sense. Someone can post a link to a news article, literally nothing more than a link, and receive thousands of dollars. Whereas a post that required several hours of effort gets nothing.
I think one easy way is address this sort of gross miss-allocation is to automatically cap rewards for posting links. If a post contains an url it can earn a max of $100 (pick a number) for the poster's time. This would reduce spam, encourage posting an analysis or original content and make more of the reward pool available to quality content.