Whales and Minnows

I'm pretty new to the whole concept and workings of steemit.

From what I'm coming to understand is that it mostly matters who likes your post instead of how many upvotes a post may have . Also exposure to posts is based on this. The big steemians are known as whales and noobs like myself are minnows. If I upvote resteem or follow you it's not going to make a significant difference to your status here. You pretty much just need whale votes. Ideally you should be able to get those purely by being good at making content, but I'm seeing shit content getting steem and allot of high quality work falling through the cracks. Of course this is not always the case, but it's really hard to feel like this forum is not a form of manipulation for a small handful of people to take advantage of several people.
I'm putting this material out here to see what happens. Does anyone notice? Can you you help me think that it's worth the time and energy to develop higher quality efforts? So far I've put very little effort and am in a position where I have no losses. I could easily be on my way.
Who's been trying hard with no luck? I see hot and trending content and am baffled as to how it's above some posts popping up in the new stream.
I wish I am wrong and my idealistic dreamer self who loves steemit for the concept were right, but my guts screaming scam!!

If you have input I'd love feedback!
Image from https://pixabay.com/en/photos/whale/