Your path to Steemit is certainly both unusual and impressive! A lot of new Steemians don't do their research to the degree you clearly have before jumping. I can tell you have a lot of prior blogging/otherwise online experience. Your presentation and your content are clean and on-point; you are far ahead of the game already.

You are definitely on the right track. All you need is attention from the right quarters. A great deal of success on Steemit is networking. Joining Discord is at this point a necessity because it allows Steemians to engage in a Whatsapp-like chat environment. Join channels relevant to you and interact with the folks therein.

Related to this is that Followers Don't Matter. Part of this is how the feed pages are laid out, part of it is simply that you need "friends" far more. See above, re: Networking.

The other important point is that Not All Upvotes are Created Equal. If you've familiarized yourself with the differences between Steem Power, Steem and SBD, you probably already know this.

Last but not least, this Steemit site as great as it is, is very much incomplete. A great deal of functionality that should be natively available is instead dangling ancillarily on steemworld.org/@venture55 or steem.supply/@venture55 or steemd.com/@venture55 (and yes, you can just substitute any other username there to see every detail of their accounts too.No secrets on the blockchain lol) Things are improving in that regard though.

Anyway, I can see I have a lot to learn from you. I will be following your output with great interest.