it is not scam, it is just a bad design in my opinion.
i did some calculations a while back and realized if you can provide high quality content then you would never post it on a third party platform like steemit, you would simply make a website (it is really cheap) and slowly grow it and earn a lot more with the traffic you get than you can ever get from steemit upvote payment peanuts.
in the early days of its release things were very different though. someone could just go there and make a 1000 bucks for nothing!
Steemit is not a scam. But, is very difficult to make a decent income from it if you don't have a huge amount of steem power.
Is it possible that these powerful people vote for themselves (another account) to get 1000 dollars per day?
i think it is a hard thing to do but exploits always exist in any system.