Unfortunately what is gold standard quality doesn't always translate into being popular. The Jerry Springer show for example was insanely popular for years, yet was crap on the quality scale (imo.)

I will say that there is an often unspoken piece here on steemit (and really authoring in general) of marketing and networking. When we put a post out, it's just one among a huge list (whether in the steemit feed, the chatroom, a discord channel, etc.) so having something that makes the post stand out from the crowd is necessary. This can range anything from the catchy headline/thumbnail image to build up name recognition and/or direct relationship. (My real life local friends are more on my radar for example.)

While I'm by no means saying this is ideal in the sense of good quality content being seen (and/or rewarded,) it's human nature, especially when we only have so much time/attention in a day to read (ideally) and vote.

It's for this specific reason that I tend to recommend to people I bring in (and provide that necessary help/hand holding at the beginning) to make their first post CONTENT take them no more than a few minutes to create (especially with them having to also spend time on the formatting and promoting.) Even when followers are established, it's still a roll of the dice being in the right place, at the right time, or added to a vote list.

I will say that I'm probably one of the few that hasn't moved away from manual voting. I have nothing against it (again since there's only so much time in the day) and often there is a human in the loop as a direct curator or to tweak the vote bot code itself. I just personally like 'hitting the button' and frequently vote on things for reasons outside pure quality or curation...such as an 'atta boy' for a new or progressing content creator.