A bit of a late reply and yes, I'm sure that things are very different now than before the Hive fork.

I wasn't around in the olden days but I can answer most of your questions... at least I'll try to. I might get some things wrong but if you hang around for a while, somebody's sure to correct me at some point.

A lot of the users on Steemit now base their activity around the curation accounts - steemcurator01 and steemcurator02. Occasionally, they'll provide a few tips (or make an innocent comment which is taken literally) to increase your chance of receiving an upvote - I think this is how OCD works but I've never really used Hive or been here long enough to know.

I'll get to the point... because sc01 and sc02 are run by the Steemit team, they prefer users who power up. So "clubs" appeared where you're in club5050 if you power up at least 50% of what you earn, club75 if you power up at least 75% and club100 if you always power up everything. These come with associated hashtags if you want to be explicit (although I've never been a fan of wasting a hashtag in this way). I created a tool to help you check if you're interested - http://steemit.lovestoblog.com/clubstatus.php?author=artgirl

Linked to this, is #steemexclusive. Whilst you can still get decent votes if you share your content on Hive or Blurt (for example), you'll do much better if your content is exclusive to Steemit. This also increases your chances of booming votes (worth about $5-$6) within a community and sc04-09 votes through other community members.

And voting bot delegations (upvu, etc.) are pretty much a no-go too if you want this kind of support.

I hope I'm not making this sound complicated. It's not really.

As for the verification, Steemit's had a lot of "problems" with users creating multiple accounts in the hope of farming the Newcomers' Community and Crypto Academy. Similarly the challenges and contests that communities run. Because of this, a lot of communities insist upon getting verified which you'll never catch me doing because I like my anonymity.

As for Steem Engine, I think it stopped running because it got hacked (although no funds were stolen). I think somebody in the Korean community is working on it to get any funds in it available but I really don't know because I've never used it so don't really care 🙂

I hope this helps. I'm a moderator in World of Xpilar where I've seen your Spanish post - I'll reply to that separately and probably with more brevity. That's a good example of a post that I'd like to nominate for booming support but can't because it's not steemexclusive.