RE: Community at its Best? Well, partly...
When i joined steemit and for the first 2-3 months if i recall correctly i was checking the trending page at least 5 times per day, read the posts and interacted with the people behind. nowadays with all the bots and about i don't even want to have the slightest look and i only check the people i follow. Sometimes when i have time i try to find out more!
i agree completely with everything you said about @steemstem and i think that steemit.inc should be more active in solving the real problems in steemit otherwise if they keep leaving them like this the ''bubble'' will burst. A thing that is bit of tricky although i believe i get what you mean is to how you add value to the platform with your posts. For example let's say i make a funny post with only 2 short paragraphs and it earns double the money out of a scientific post because a whale liked it and upvote or whatever the reason ( except bots). How can you see the real value in this? to someone it may be valuable to someone else not even if in reality a scientific post is indeed more valuable :p
Thanks for your comment.
@trumpan has just posted an awesome article on 'communities' within steemit, which are supposed to act similar to subreddits. This feature would allow segregated fields of content which appeal to the relevant people. This way you wouldn't care or even notice the posts which don't add 'value' to your life, because everyone would stay isolated to their own communities.
The trouble at the moment is that the tags are not specific enough, so, posts which take 10-15 minutes to create, with little creativity and effort are sometimes rising above other posts which may take days to research and write, within a tag. I have a problem with this in particular.
There could then be communities of pictures and memes, communities for research articles, etc. This would ensure that everyone will get fair recognition for what they provide to their niche community.