Great observations. I agree that the quality of content here is diluted with lots of memes and self-promoting stuff. I still rely on Medium to have much better articles and way better curation. I'm still experimenting with how to get what I want to see to show up; clicking on "Trending" and "Hot" only seems to exacerbate the "winner take all" effect of only seeing posts written by high-value accounts/Steem celebrities with low-average quality posts. Lately I've been spending a fair amount of time only using the "New" tab, and particularly the introduceyourself category, since the introductions there give me hope for the future of the platform. Cheers, and welcome to Steemit!