You need to buy lots of STEEM to gain support
I will say that putting some into the platform that is essentially paying

Agree with you about the confidence point, I'm under no misguidance that people look at the size of my wallet and yours too and it may make a difference to the vote weight.

However, the curation groups from what I have seen will dish out hefty votes if the author can deliver, though they do need to be seen for this to happen.

The new people also need to realize that it takes time and a lot of work to get known and get to a somewhat successful point here.

They do, it takes many months and I would say a year for things to start happening. There's not an easy way in unless you want to start with 1,000,000 STEEM powered up.