I remember myself as a newbie and you are right, it was hard. At that time attention of @curie was only one way to promote your posts. And it was not worse times.
But being a curator is not easier job. Now, in one hand, users have much more options and channels for promotion, free and paid. In another hand we have more users, who use these tools, but not everyone of them are producing a quality content.
Pictures and YouTube links without any explanation, plagiarism, rewrited guides "how to be successful" for newbies from another newbies, rewrited wiki articles, spam, beggers for upvotes/followers - we have tons of this on Steemit now. For man, who is curating posts manually is hard to find something valuable. That's why I stopped to check "New". Sorry🙁