Hey Jordan.

You made interesting observations. Here are few thoughts.

There is a big learning curve here in the platform. But after a while, you will figure it out. Just be patient and read the guides. You will find plenty.

The community is indeed awesome.

Your rewards are great yet exceptional. If you see ( you can see by installing the more steem chrome extension ) more than 80% of your payouts were from less than 5% of your voters. The "big guys" voted you. We call them whales. Their votes were well deserved cause the videos are awesome. It's not sure that you will always have their attention and love ( and vote :) )

For your questions.

Usually, SBD is used to boost posts with bots. You are doing great with your posts so you may not benefit that much by them. You can have 10-20 in your account and play around with them.

I would suggest to power up until you get to 500 SP. then you can adjust your voting power, so that you can vote more often. Generally, more SP is better. Is more power. :)

I have read and my experience shows it, that you make most of your rewards during the first 2 days. ( I could say first 24 hours , but you can see how it goes ). So it makes sense to post every other day.

Hope it helped.
Cheers ! :)