Powerful post; you mentioned the disproportionate influence that SP creates.

People starting out, I'll speak from my experience, I read about 25 introduction posts. I looked to the introduction posts that had generated the most I could find (a range between 50-100+). So, I put in some effort and crafted the first post to introduce myself. A week later I got my first 0.005 steem.

Next - Content only holds value for 1 week. Many forms of content is VERY limited by this constraint. A video for example, might attract a handful of views and a few likes within that 7 days... what happens if the video goes viral on day 10 and gets 1000's of more likes after... well, it is gone.

Next - Unless you are a whale and have people just waiting for you to post so they can get a chance at curation rewards, then any success depends on bots OR the long and drawn out efforts of slowly attracting people towards your own content... and I've learned recently about the epidemic of resteem bots (about 1/3 of my followers have 0 original posts and only resteems).

Most people do not have the time and dedication to collect pennies for articles written that might take a few hours to write and format, add images, sources, etc... then to watch it disappear into obscurity while giving a few cents, then to look on the trending page seeing garbage click bait that is 2 paragraphs and a picture getting 1000$ worth of steem. That is a kick to the balls that people generally won't want to put themselves through.... so, they just stop posting.

That's really only looking at the negative end, I wouldn't be here if there weren't some positives to offset that, but I understand the perspective that if a system seems unfair, people will not stick around.

If people are not sticking around, then there's nobody buying steem and people selling, so, the price will drop.

rant over.