are we truly doing this as part of an effort to create a more active/interactive and vibrant community?

On this one I think and believe that is the goal of @steemcommunity, to make a more active/interactive and vibrant community.

As for quality it really is all in the ey of the reader/viewer. I see steem blockchain as a social site/experiment, I am having a lot of fun on here, yeah there are bad days, bad players, and toes get stepped on, and everyone has a different concept of what the steem blockchain is. I choose to see the social side.

So here we double back to the quality question, and I'm not suggesting we look only for quality content creators; rather we should focus the minnow building efforts on sincere content creators — enthusiastic, happy to be part of the process and community, but might create all sorts of sincere content.

That paragraph pretty much says it all.