A well written post @humanearl. You just stated the truth is plain sentence.Awesome.As always, you sure are a source of motivation.
I feel the reason why people don't get more payouts on the quality posts is that they don't invest in Steem Power! More Steem Power equals to bigger upvote value. Your payouts will definitely increase when you upvote your own post. I normally do that once a day. Self-upvoting is also another ethical issue and I don’t believe in upvoting oneself too much. If everyone just upvotes themselves solely, the platform will fail and Steem will not have value. One of the reasons why Steemit is great is because people upvote each other’s post and ultimately upvote quality content. It keeps the platform alive.