If I am following the point you are making accurately, I think it is a mistake to believe Steem can succeed by trying to be quality content first. Quality content will come eventually if the world values Steem enough for it to survive to that point.
Steem is not really needed for solving content quality. Youtube and Twitter have "fast food" content and high quality content, Steem can never be just quality content because it is meant to be used by everyone. Steem does not solve any problems related to quality content, on the contrary, the most talented content producers are more interested in the audiences of Youtube, Twitter and Facebook than Steem.
So, what does Steem solve? Censorship resistant information sharing. I believe Steem is most successful as Twitter's counterpoint. Twitter is heavy on the censorship, which is good for those that want a "safe space" so to speak. But journalists, political commentators and provocateurs struggle on Twitter despite the fact that they love the platform for their work. Steem can solve their problems.
Also, as Smooth said, Steem currently does not have the capability to adequately reward long-form content. But content the length of a tweet? Sure, $5-$200 earnings for a simple but viral message within 150-250 characters sounds very fair, and $0.05-$0.50 on a good comment sounds cool.
Art:
Also, quality can be subjective as well like art. Agreed that Steem serves as a safe space like you said. So, I archive my work here as a way to keep backups online. That is a priceless feature. I would add a donate button on posts to allow people to send their favorite artists some tips, some money, and not just an upvote button.
Steem Upvote Add-ons
I would also encourage people to develop Steem apps and specifically add-ons which can offer different upvoting systems that do not depend completely on the Steem pool or even at all.
Decentralize Pool Systems
I would seek to decentralize pool systems as opposed to only being limited to the centralized upvote pool and also the downvote pool of the Steem blockchain. For example, Busy.org could have an independent pool system that could be added through a web browser add-on or some other method. That would add increase competition in the money systems or pool systems that could simply incentivize innovation in all of that. And it seeks to minimize cartels and especially monopolies which could plague pool systems.
You have some nice ideas.
You might not know this, but Steem doesn't actually protect your artwork. Images and Audio are not immutably recorded by the blockchain, they are stored on private servers. Only the text can actually be censorship resistant on Steem.
That said, your posts cannot be deleted by someone else, so even if the artwork is not actually stored on the blockchain, nobody can ever delete your posts that direct people to that artwork. :)
Yeah, I've heard about that. Is IPFS the best way to store images, video, etc?
Yep.