Great comment and applaud you putting your content out there! I can speak from personal experience that it takes time to build up any sort of consistency on posts. Much like being an author anywhere there are things beyond the content itself to bring that success, including the marketing and networking aspect. If I was to walk into a physical bookstore (yes there are still a few around, lol) there are certain authors that would catch my eye more than others (for reasons like reading their previous work) and/or topics that I'm interested in.

It's still a similar game to that on here, where everything we post is just one amongst a huge list of posts. There are definitely methods to help stand out in those lists while also building your name recognition/following.

If you ever have questions or like some assistance along these lines, feel free to drop me a DM in steemit.chat or you can also hop into the Steemprentice Mentor Group channel in steemit.chat . We are there just to help users out in areas like this. While we can not ever guaranty a payout, we can absolutely help improve the odds for you.

It is hard to consistently put hours and hours and hours of work into a post (not to mention the time promoting it afterwards) and see it come back as pennies per hour. You definitely seem to have the right idea though, that if it's something you want to write, and feel it's worth the time to make it what you feel it should be (quality wise) there is if nothing else personal benefits. For example, I'd written absolutely nothing for at least 10 years before joining on here. While it may not be my method to pay the bills, I'm happy with what I've produced.

I will say that I'm very happy to see the short form posts (news, til/today i learned, and funny) receiving curation now. It takes the necessity away of feeling like pages and pages have to be produced on every post, which in my mind will help to make those long posts better, since users don't feel forced to just draw things out unnecessarily.

Some of these solutions are already in the works either through the developers themselves (like the new editor which I'm stoked to see), projects like busy.org, user driven projects, or ideas that spawn from posts like these.

I'm seriously planning to try to implement something (if I can find the time) that would accept smaller user donations and provide some lottery, award or other method to help keep the new users engaged. (these prizes would ONLY go to smaller and/or new users)

But in all reality, we as a whole community are always going to have to find solutions for these and other future issues that arise. We truly will rise or fall together.