Albeit I'm new around here and I don't fully understand the entire ecosystem that is steemit. This is interesting for a few reasons.

From what I gather from your post and what I've learned so far. Success on steemit is driven by a few things. (I'm measuring success by the amount of influence, or $$ a vote can give.) Good content and big whales who have the influence to create value on posts made by the community are the biggest contributors to someones success on the platform.

My concern with the whole model of this platform is that there is a ton of content, enough that thousands, maybe more posts will likely never get seen or voted on. There are definitely not thousands of big whales who can curate content on a daily basis, as a result we have curation bots. Honestly I tend to ignore automated curation as I prefer to have organic growth.

However I've sort of fallen into a recent routine where I'm investing SBD in hopes to power up my account. Eventually this wont be sustainable unless I choose to allocate 50% of SP to SBD. I think I'll continue to use this method and hopefully during the process I'll have enough data to go off whether this is an effective way for anyone knew to the platform to grow their page without the direct influence of a big whale.

The downside is that I'm not getting any human response, yet. Maybe this will change.