Agree that current rewards system encourages top-poster following and empty "steemit is great your article is awesome" comments. One would think that time-based voting would be enough to encourage thoughtful voting for quality posts of unknown authors - instead of picking low hanging pennies from popular authors, but it is not working, maybe because content hunting is left to the minnows but top posts are created by whales, and there is a large (order of magnitude) gap in voting power.

I do not think top poster handicap is going to solve that divide, though - but I think it could be solved by bringing these posts out through UI changes, maybe making "hot posts from new authors" more prominent.