I agree with a lot of what you're saying here and I think the biggest problem we have with doing this on STEEM at this point is that the distribution is already so far gone that new users are never going to be able to wallk in and earn stake like we could when I get here. Most people don't know this, but I quit my job when STEEM was at 9 cents and started doing this 100+ hours a week. It's the only thing I ever really felt passionate about in my life and I felt like this was the future I had been waiting for, but the problem we have now is that users aren't earning hundreds of STEEM for a twenty-thirty dollar post. Users are lucky to earn a couple STEEM on their best work if they aren't paying for people to vote on their posts and it completely break the systems. It's so pay to play at this point that I think we're going to have to rely on second layer solutions to get people investing their time into the chain again, which is we launched PALnet. I share your concerns and while I'm not worried about the 50/50 split, I do think it's too little too late to fix STEEM alone.
As a noob, who has decided to stop creating content. I agree with everything you say. I was getting .01 or .02 cents for hours of work which wasn't a big deal because I just wanted to share my work. But someone with more money than me reposted my art in their blog to expose people for what he called plagerism, and he made more money from that 1 post of my work than I had made the whole time on this site. The whole experience was completely deflating, upsetting etc. So that is my personal experience of being a noob on steemit. I don't think I'm the only one to have this experience and I would imagine there is a high attrition rate and not much incentive to post quality when you work hard but there is no chance that you will be rewarded adequatley and someone else posts rubbish and makes money for nothing. On top of that some people can make you not want to be here. Hope my personal experience will help illustrate what is going on down in the trenches. It's not pretty.
I've seen this happen with quite a few people and yes, it's very disheartening. It's hard to expect people to come here when there are users trying to actively dissuade them.