I've got a few additional things for you to consider, which are perhaps insights that I can provide from my experiences here on steemit.

1. Views and votes have no correlation (as you were highlighting in the screenshots). Some people have dozens (hundreds?) of accounts, so when they vote, all of their accounts vote. So 1 reader, casting 1 vote (with 10-100+ accounts) skews the numbers. Then you have bots which follow other people, which tacks on even more votes. Next up is curation trails, where a single read and vote from one reader might trigger a domino effect of hundreds of votes to follow, because they trust that curation trail and it's rules. On the other end of the spectrum, not all views are registered and saved. I have software that blocks my browsing analytics and most websites won't track my visit as a view. So now if I vote, you'll end up with multiple votes and 0 views :)
2. There's only so many votes you can cast in a day, and so many whales in the sea. Whales typically aren't going to vote more than 30-40 times (since 40 is the soft limit) on average per day. There's thousands of posts per day, so only a fraction of them are actually going to capture a whales or curation trails attention. Many of the curation trails/guilds will also spread the love, and not vote on the same account again for X number of days after a vote. These are the "rules" they've setup and run with.
3. SP is an investment and curation is a means to increase that investment. You said this in so many words, but SP and curation is a way for an investor to earn on their investment. That's the way I treat voting and curation trails, I have an investment in this platform and I want to maximize my potential. So I've setup a trail of curation that I follow along, and honestly I don't know what it's voting for half the time, only that it's helping increase my investment. With the work I do, I don't have time to manually curate as much as I'd like, so I have a bot helping do the rest. On the other hand, in my off hours when I actually catch up and read a few things, votes like I cast on this post are by hand :)

To finish off my ramblings, I'll just say that no one here thinks this is the perfect system, and there are hours and hours worth of discussions happening on how to improve and refine it. It does suck when you spend hours writing a post, with the hopes of earning a reward, to not see that reward materialize. It happens to the best of us.

Also - thank you for writing out your thoughts though in a well spoken and mild mannered approach. There's been so much hostility and drama lately, it's nice to see posts that may actually spark discussion with reason :)