I've been here for about three months and I completely agree that the curation process/culture is minnow unfriendly, and in fact I outlined a post about this on my whiteboard last night. I've found some tricks to enhance minnows' voting power, but they do require rejecting the common folklore taught new users. I'll post this later.

It is worth commenting here that, in my opinion, much of the damage done to Steemit in particular comes from the folklore passed to the newbies. I don't think that this folklore exists to intentionally damage new users and the platform, but the strategies fail when everyone follows them. Of course, this is true in almost all markets.