It's good to see you're still going at it!
A couple of years ago, I remember steem being described as a "gift" economy, the gift being the upvotes. That does make sense in a way, the gift of an upvote is how we continue to grow our accounts. I agree with you that it's not just about the money, there's the interaction and the interesting information that gets posted on the steem blockchain, but it is indeed the upvotes that we get that grow our accounts.
After about 2 and 1/2 tears on the steem platform, I've managed to make it to a bit over 3000 SP on my account. Because of my delegations to a few projects, I'm using about 2600 SP for my upvote efforts. Right now, that's worth about 2 cents. :-)