Hey, I hear ya - the more time I spend on steemit the more questions I have and the more tiny leaks I find. In my opinion, steemit has a ways to go with balancing out the community. Right now the whales have an extreme amount of influence over the platform which in one sense is fair, because they have invested so heavily. In another sense, pay-to-play can seem unfair to many of the newcomers.

I actually wrote an article yesterday about the average account value for the first page of the Trending/Hot categories. Check it out if you want to see some interesting $ numbers.

Cheers!