Like your comments, I am a new comer to Steemit and learning my way around. Have the same experiences as you do. Its the whales who really decide what gets noticed, also without the bots it is practically impossible to push your content and monetize it.

Coming to the fundamentals of blockchain that seems to be the violation of what blockchain talks about. Hope we do not got to the old saying Money is king, then there will be no difference between centralized social media versus steemit.

So far it has been an interesting learning curve however.