The devs vote primarily for STEEM hype, creating another sort of self fulfilling prophesy, so fix your own behaviors before trying to correct those of others. Look at all the big winners on trending page and you will see the correlation very clearly.
Steem is a big game and the objective is to win in any way possible. If the incentive system is broken, that's not the players' faults. The voting system should be completely blind. I'll make a proposal and we'll see if it gets upvoted.
How do you make it blind? Make it so no one knows how anyone else voted? But it's on the blockchain.
Ring cryptography ?
I describe a system whereby you can have blind voting without ring signatures here.