Replied to this below, but basically I was unclear on what my frustration was: that investing before building a following is a mistake here due to dilution hurting heavily invested people more and a lack of a following makes it so paying off "break even rewards" is harder.

I fully understand that steem needs to be mined/witnessed to pay for blogs and this causes the dilution, but the distribution of them is disproportionate to effort and following and the "upper middle class" investors are the ones currently struggling. The saving grace is, as @hisnameisolllie said in the parent post, the distribution of wealth will drastically change due to the dilution rates.