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.
RE: It's not Koreans vs the rest of us...It should be us, united, vs a guy who's trying to tear us apart.