Thanks for your detailed response.

The good thing is that you’re not alone. I’ve seen other large Steeminans out there who see the big picture and use their voting power on smaller accounts rather than going after curation rewards. The most obvious example is @hr1 who gives out lots of decent sized upvotes to smaller users with decent original posts. I got a curie upvote once but with curie you have to be really into writing to get curie upvotes consistently. I've looked into writing for other curation projects.

Steemmonsters is the only Steem DAPP I’ve heard of. I will have to look into learning about more Steem applications.