I went through almost the same process. I didn't blog often because much of my random thoughts didn't seem important enough to blog about. But here, well here this is my space to think out loud. This is for me as much as it's for everyone else I enjoy helping.

As to the money and how it impacts you, I went through that also. I ended up hiding the dollar signs for a day just to see if it changed how I voted or posted. You can read more about that here.

I wonder if you'd be interested in playing with the blockchain itself at all. It's a bit messy, but writing some code to play with that data was really exciting for me because I have been a blockchain fanboy for a long time, but hadn't yet actually written any blockchain related code until steemit. I slapped together some PHP code, and I've had a lot of fun with it.