I left Steemit a year ago or so for these same reasons. The "too big to fails" were unabashedly abusing their power, blatantly in front of everyone. As an artist, who invested significant time into each of my posts, it was impossible to justify contributing quality content to the platform.
Well, I recently started posting here again and have actually seen a general trend toward the positive. There seems to be a more consistent investment by curators. Though the return does not outweigh my investment it seems to be slightly more stable overall.
I am going to continue to post high powered content for some time, to see if it ends up being worth it. But if it turns out to be more of the same I would rather just focus my energy into building my audience on Facebook. That's where 90% of my business comes from. Can't really compete with that.
RE: Proof of Brain? 'Proof of Popularity'!