I think that's false assumption.

The higher your standards, the less competitive you become. Because it takes more work/talent to write a good piece, and in the current economy, no matter how good the article is, there's not enough votes that are genuine to want to go towards it, so it's a race to the bottom.

On those whitelists / blacklists / standard-setting. It's mostly just to virtue signal and hope the standard isn't so low that it attracts downvotes.

Ocdb is the lesser evil as it doesn't take too much middleman fees, but the economic forces under the current setup remains. It'll become more apparent as the price gets higher.