I can definitely see that being part of the issue. Having been a dev in the boiler room for a few heavy SEO reliant domains, it was remarkable the kind of low quality articles people would spin and Google would eat up, especially before Penguin and Panda. The blame can't all be put on Google, the SEO industry is a dirty place that consistently pushed out small producers of genuine content in order to make a buck.
Google has been doubling down on this direction progressively--their justification being that people game the long tail by producing a lot of low quality, highly niched content.
There may be no real solution to this within the context of Google's PageRank-inspired algorithm and this may be an opportunity for disruption.