Hi, what is the 'best' content is totally subjective and that is part of the point of Hive's design - a consensus is reached among the stakeholders via the voting process as to what is subjectively 'best'. Obviously, this means that large stakeholders can direct the outcome more than small stakeholders, however, at the same time there would be zero money to pay anyone any rewards without the investment from stakeholders. There is no other system that is voluntary that can result in your content getting decent financial rewards from strangers that doesn't involve advertising. When advertisers get involved the biases are increased far more than occurs on Hive - the list of content topics that will never receive a penny from Youtube ads, for example, is very long.

From what I can tell, the big stakeholders on Hive are mostly people who have been here since the beginning of Steem and who have amassed tokens through investment of time, creation of projects and generally (subjectively) helping the project. As with the offline world, the chances are that there are some thieves, scammers and other bad actors who are among the big stakeholders too. This is a problem with virtually all economic systems - the banks and governments being arguably orders of magnitude more corrupt than anything on Hive is ever likely to be.

From my perspective, the shadiness of Hive is reflective of the shadiness of the rest of the world, but at least Hive overcomes some of the biggest problems of Web 2.0 sites. Hive is also open source, so if you can improve on it then you are always welcome to fork and do just that. Hive welcomes criticism and challenges critics to do better.