This is definitely a difficult nut to crack.

Some of the frustration people have is automatic voting. People, especially people with lots of SP, will set automatic voting for people they want to automatically support. I've had a couple people with decent amounts of SP do that for my posts. They are not doing it anymore, but they did. It helped me get started too. I am thankful for their support!

Some whales use steemit.com as a crypto bank account. Who can blame them? This site has very high security with ways to lock your money away very securely. Even if your account is stolen, the thief has to wait for weeks to withdraw your SP. That is pretty good protection. Therefore, take your profits from elsewhere, and lock them away here. It makes sense.

Some of them are pretty bad though, and they will repeatedly and regularly upvote their posts AND their replies to feed themselves more and more SP. Those people are known however, and there are tools to easily reveal them. Just ignore them. Who cares? There are plenty of whales who do support quality content when they see it.

There's the real problem too. What is quality content? How do we decide? Because of auto voting, we see utter crap being paid high amounts. People support their friends regardless of the quality content too. That's how this system works, and I kinda like it that way. My SP gives me a very small piece of the daily crypto to hand out. Who's going to get it? Well, I'm going to support my fellow Liberty Professionals first. Then I'm going to give the rest to quality new accounts and other quality content.

It's my choice, right? We are in control as individuals over our small piece of the pie.

I don't think there's an easy answer to this issue. One thing that has been pointed out by a friend of mine is that whales who want to sell STEEM need STEEM buyers. How do you get STEEM buyers? You entice people to invest in their own SP. The more SP, the more you can give out, right? That draws in buyers, and then the sellers have a way to sell. It's a reasonable theory too. Again, I don't blame those people for wanting buyers. I'm investing a little of my money into SP, but I'll never invest too much of my wealth here.

No one should. Keep your investments spread across multiple baskets to minimize your risk.

I posted something that took me a week to think about, write in my head, and do the research for it. That post made pennies. Then I've posted random topics that I, at the last minute while standing at my computer, took only minutes to write. Those posts did really well. Trust me. It makes no sense to me either. LOL I won't pretend to understand what is valuable to others and what is not.

Quality matters unless you have auto voters. Engagement matters more than posts too in the beginning before your reputation is high. You want good quality followers too, not just random ones. The more quality followers you have, the better off you'll be in the long run both in reputation gained and pay outs.

Anyway, that's my two cents... I'm not sure it's even worth that much. haha ;-)