I think a brand new competitor especially has a chance of they are under the wings of a big company. Which provides them both money and knowledge. This could also be A steemit whale with a few millions USD.
Otherwise it will be indeed really difficult to catch up with Steemit.

How could it help people like me? I still think I will basically earn close to nothing.

Do you have any info about the current reward distribution? At this moment my feeling says it's more like 80/2 instead of 20. If you look at the amount of Steem people have its actually like 80/0.2. That's at least what I concluded from arcange his data. But that data did not say anything about the reward distribution. Do you know any data about that?