I'll admit, when I first started torrent I was not really familiar with how it worked and how important seeding was. I would just use magnet links without configuration to save the torrent and seed after completion. Well.. I have finally, got myself back to 1.00 after a couple months and working to try to always seed double what I get for each torrent.
Often times I was one of the few random seeders available for some of these torrents. Friendly reminder to give back because you never know when you're one of the rare cases that can complete someones long lost file download!
Part of the problem is that people who hit some massive share ratio are doing it at the expense of people who are simply trying to hit 1.0.
My guess is that most of the people with really high ratios aren't even aware of how much they're sharing. They just set the things to seed and then forget them. Some people do treat it like a competition, but for many it isn't. Most are probably just trying to be nice and make sure that something stays available.
What's really needed is some seeding priority thing so that someone who is trying to prove they're not a leech is given top priority to seed things, and someone who has already established their credentials is put at the back of the queue.
I fail to see the problem with not being able to seed to 1:1. Most sites provide points for seeding over time which can either be used to increase upload or buy free leech tokens (which allow you to download anyway). It should be more than enough to download what you want once you have a large enough seeding size.
The BitTorrent protocol prioritizes fast seeds to achieve the best possible transfer speed. It's goal is not for everyone to be seeding to the same ratio.
Also the best way to help the network is to keep content available. For this purpose the speed of it's seeds is not as important.