> First of all, you will never attract creators with any talent to Steem. Best case scenario, is to provide a place that might reward a content creator as he is developing his skill set - and before he goes mainstream and moves on.

This is not true historically. In 2017 there was some growth in the platform. Many "mainstream" creators joined Steem. This was during a time when the rewards were a lot higher so it was more attractive to join.

There is in my opinion no shortage of creative talent on Steem. Many people have accounts, many companies have accounts, but there is simply no incentive to produce high quality content. The time and effort to do so consistently is not even being rewarded with followers now because Steem isn't functioning well enough to grow.

So even if the reward pool were growing there still has to be enough new users to grow the follower base.

> Second, most users aren't very good at picking out high quality content.

I disagree. I think popularity is a valid metric in judging the quality of content. There is no expert who can tell the masses how they should think or what they should like. When Steem did work it at least rewarded popular content.

> Fourth, you will never get people to upvote a 'stranger' over upvoting her 'friend'. This is a form of social media. People will reward friends and family members first. (As they should).

I upvote strangers and my "friends". Voting power is renewable and is not some super scarce resource. So even if 80% of my votes were to go to myself and my "friends" the other 20% would go to complete strangers. This is assuming curators have friends as maybe some do and some don't.

I see nothing wrong with people voting for their friends. Relationship building is actually beneficial and is of high utility. If people form friendships rather than just be consumers it means they are interacting with Steem and the community on a greater level of commitment than to just post and upvote mechanically. These emotional ties actually are what give the community it's true wealth.

> For example, younger audiences prefer political memes to political essays. Which one gets the upvotes is more determined by demographics than content quality.

Study some of my blog posts. You will find that my view is that user satisfaction is the only means of calculating utility. To add value to the user is to make the user happy via the content or to satisfy a need of the user via the content. This is highlighted in my post on Utility Theory. 

Quoting myself:

> Steem needs to focus on maximizing utility
This is the key take away, that the problem right now with Steem is that it isn't effectively maximizing utility. In other words the value in terms of how much happiness we get per unit of value we put into it is unfavorable for all participants at this time. In particular, those who buy Steem Power support the ecosystem and the utility they get from the system isn't high enough.

[Steem must improve and the key metric for that improvement is "utility"](https://steemit.com/smt/@dana-edwards/steem-must-improve-and-the-key-metric-for-that-improvement-is-utility)

8 month old post. So the point of developers in my opinion is to serve the demographics you speak of. If they care about political memes then developers can build apps to help us create more effective political memes. Bloggers who write essays can adapt to write political memes to help with marketing their essays. In other words give people the content they want and offer any form of content people will accept. The creative adapts by creating what people like whilst also providing value in other ways such as by explaining complex topics or injecting humor into political topics.

Attack Steem if your intent is to make it better. Why attack the creatives who provide the content? They are not to blame for the economic incentive structure. You can't blame the student if the teacher designed a flawed curriculum.