I'm so glad to hear you felt like this aswell! Not that I mean it's good that you're frustrated sometimes, but it's good to see I'm not the only one and it's good to see my article speaks to people :-)
I'm glad to hear you're sticking to your own path. I think this is the way that you'll last the longest, because you'll enjoy yourself the most. That way, the rewards will just follow after.
Thank you for your sweet comment! I hope more people will stay true to themselves :-)
In my test regarding the randomness of earnings I came to the conclusion that it is in fact completely random in most cases. Did you know that when you edit your post, add a space or just change the used tags, you get an extra up vote in most cases? This process can be done again and again, walking through all the tags here on Steemit... :) Sometimes it don't work in the evening, but some hours earlier or later. I think what most people don't know is how many bots are voting their articles. And what I saw, while analysing who on Steemit makes use of whale shares, is that nearly all the well paid publishers do it. I didn't want to do it, but if there is no other way and so many people are doing it, I'll give it a try in the next days. I'll come back to you and post my results here ;)
Oh wow, I love that you did all this research! Thank you so much for sharing your findings here :D