I was having a fangasm while I was reading this post but halfway through I realized I haven't contributed to this culture enough to fully get what I can and want to get out of it.
I really love this culture. The biggest obstacles I see to it is censorship and lack of avenues to monetization. I don't have much hope on the monetization part but Steemit(and other sites not dependent on advertising) may prove to be part of the solution to the censorship.
I feel you brother, I really do... I've helped organize some events in my country, but have never cosplayed myself, I don't think I have the courage to do that. Most of the things I've done are helping with some small translations here and there and organizing a bit for the people.
Censorship is really something that hits hard, I wonder how I forgot to include it as part of the bad things in the post. Japan being a Xenophobic country doesn't help in that regard, heck most of the anime we enjoy are fan-translated (god bless them). I'm no expert with monetization so I won't touch the subject much from an official point or financial point, but I think with a platform like Steemit (and others) many fans could get many rewards for their hard work (besides the appreciation of course).
The hard work of getting the raw manga, translating, editing, making the text fit in the correct places and then sharing it with the community is really something else. I hope to one day see more and more of these people come to places like Steemit (and perhaps to our own community) so we can all show our appreciation with $ votes.
Steemit being the solution to censorship is probably not quite correct, remember that steemit is a blogging/social network platform, so we can't very well make posts showing authors' uncensored content, at least not directly or as the main point of the post.