Imagine that the community on the steem blockchain is actually very small compared to the traditional social media sites. Recently i've heard the number of about 100.000 of active accounts. When you subtract all the boring crypto talkers and bots, i think we only have maybe a couple of thousands (or even only hundreds) of creative, productive, progressive people. Minus those who simply aren't interested in your topic...

I don't know if my logic is correct, but after all this is the kind of "reality" i'm trying to deal with.

To answer your headline, cool people are somewhere around, but they are hard to find. And there is no shortcut for trawling :)

To make things a little bit easier i recommend to always set the timeline to "New" post, not the default "Trending". Look under various tags, not only those that are presented on the startpage. Before you vote, check out recent comments! There are bots that leave a comment when the poster is a known spammer, which happens often, unfortunately.

It's also a good idea to use another frontend than steemit. Projects like busy.org or steempeak.com are way more fun.