I see you are not using any Steemit improvement addons like SteemPlus (Highly recommended)
You haven't covered much of how large the ecosystem actually is. There are many dozens of alternative front-ends like D.tube and utopian.io. If you have a quick look at https://steemprojects.com/ there are apparently 337 apps and tools for Steem. (sadly I noticed a few of very important one are not listed there)
I fully agree that a lot of the reward is being indirectly "Staked" (self-votes/bots) and that affect negatively the content discovery that makes Steem valuable. On the other hand there is also a whole lot of the reward that is shared away to contributions like code or good content and that create a ton of real economic activity.
Raw staking is frown upon by many whales and is often neutralized via flag attacks, so for now promotion bots are the simplest way to earn a passive income from Steem investments.
All voting bots have their own terms of service, for example 
While the cost paid might be equal to the value of the received votes payouts, since the money it is at risk of getting flagged during the 7 days leading to payout and half of it is being paid out as vested Steem, (SteemPower requiring 13 week cool-down) the customers have to promote content that is likely to earn them more than they risked on promotion.
My opinion is that as it become simpler and simpler for normal people to access these promotion services the competition will move from bidding skills/gambling toward creating extra value from the earned exposure on your content. The quality of the front-page will then increase along with demand for landing on it. (Trust me, very smart peoples are working towards that)
I believe Steem can easily scale as it relate to achieving world-class stake based content discovery but Steem's technology cannot currently scale as a way for billions of people to interact with their close friend like they do on Facebook, almost none of that is transactional and rarely benefit from being on a censorship resistant Blockchain.
I see Steem as a very active reactor of economic activity with a social component that makes it's future applications at a high risk of going viral and attracting a lot of external interest.
Steem is the blockchain that taps the most into the many various skills of people that are not crypto geeks.
Considering the many possible outcomes from rewarding these contributors via proof of brain, while it's users are operating within a very smooth and convenient value transfer system that's using recognizable account names and free transactions, I believe Steem is somewhat backed by real world value creation and is thus a good hedge to Bitcoin during a bear market.
I could speak a lot about the upcoming Steem core development that will greatly improve the building of various views on content and makes it easy to build subject based sub-communities like Sub-reddits but that'd be worthy of a full post, so I'll just drop this here : https://steemit.com/steem/@steemitblog/update-communities-hivemind
Shameless plug; Delegating SteemPower to
RE: Critical Analysis of Steem and Why I'm Invested