Hey, I saw this post because I was tagged. Did you see my data about rewards : word count? I think it might provide some additional inputs and broader insights for your post:

@holoz0r/posts-word-count-rewards-communities-and-other-weekly-analytical-reports-2nd-week-of-july

I would argue that

a) Not every post is equal
b) they should be assessed against their peers
c) KE based curation would not serve to appropriately award those who are putting in a great deal of effort and actively have their ke go from big number to small number
d) There is already a great deal of nepotism on HIVE

An example, from my personal circumstances, with a KE of ~6.1.

I took a lot of my HP into Splinterlands, and it never came back again :) It came out from Splinterlands, and went into buying various photographic gear, which I put back into HIVE posts.

I definitely agree with you that there is way too much of a free lunch on HIVE, but my argument is that it might be the autovoters getting a lot of that free lunch.

We need more manual curation, and more encouragement of the genuine engagement that users participate in through initiatives like topcomment, for example.

After all, HIVE is a social platform. If we do not have people genuinely engaged in discussion, creativity, sharing, and other things, they will leave. I've been on Steem (and HIVE) for almost 9 years now, I have lost so many people in those years.

So many people who create content that is on par or if not better than most of the content I see in trending daily that is published (and voted for) by users with low KE scores.

I can also posit something else, which may be a dangerous statement to make: perhaps those with a low KE, with large, and high HP, and lots of friends in similar situations, may indeed feel threatened by the prospect of higher quality content trimming down their own earnings.

KE may not be the point of discussion, but there's one thing that I have observed.

People who are going to create things, are going to create things - whether there is a reward or not. Whether they choose to publish it exclusively to HIVE is another matter all together.

There are shit posts, and then there are shit posts yours is neither of them, and I look forward to seeing what sort of discussions it raises in the comments during the coming days :)