Upvotes will always be a taboo topic.
At the beginning of hive there were many wars between upvotes and downvotes with the justice that were making the ecosystem fair as most users won Hive by being on Steem.
Another war that existed but that I don't know if it still exists is the votes in the posts themselves. I am against this because in reality by doing this you are not contributing to the ecosystem but you are only increasing your power in the network and over time this can become a problem. However I see some accounts to be done constantly and nothing gets done.

Regarding the rewards of posts, I fully agree that people should not go to other people's posts to ask for votes and followers. The purpose of hive is to be a social platform so people should try to interact as much as possible with other people and these interactions naturally ended up generating new followers and maybe a few more votes on the posts.
But this will not happen overnight.

I've been on Hive for a year and during the first year, except for a few posts where I had bigger rewards, I was getting cents but that didn't make me give up. I continued to make my posts and try to improve more and more and interacting with people.

The issue with rewards is that many people who join Hive come after easy money (I don't know if they were "fooled" by someone who told them it was easy or because there will be some posts with high rewards and they think it's like that as a general rule) .
Many of these new users don't even know the rules of Hive and even publish things that are not their own in an attempt to earn good rewards.

I think people should look at Hive more as a matter of creating connections and contacts that have the benefit of potentially having a financial return but never being the financial return the main objective.