There should be indeed much more. I am number 501xxx something on the steem ecosystem and if I do look at the stats you are presenting to us, I should not be this high in the rankings. For sure, if you know that I do consider myself a bad writer, so if even I can make something of my Steem account, why can't others?
Well there are several reasons for this. On one side you do have the people who don't trust the system and on the other hand you do have to people who still do believe that it is a quick rich scheme! Expecting a daily of weekly upvote from a whale.
Well I did got my first one a week ago and this stupid Steemian did donate a big part of it to the prize pool.
You are not discouraging me. I do know that there are a lot of contest going on, most participants and there for the quick bucks and probably most of the participants in our contest will be the same. But I already had some friendly banter with some people I did not know before, which is worth all the effort!

What does discourage me the most, is to see how some people vote, following a curation trail blindly, while I do see people around me, trying to make the best out of it, without getting noticed. People are just trowing money out of the window!
I really think that the Steem blockchain is a great idea, they just did underestimate the greed of people.
Besides great articles like yours and some other, interaction is what this eco system really needs! The comment/post ratio is ridiculous low. It is that low we should not be allowed to call steem a social media platform!