I've been with Steemit for a few weeks. Significant effort is spent by platform members to weed out poor quality and unoriginal content. This arises particularly from new members transitioning from social media channels where they only had to like, forward, copy or briefly respond to existing posts. Creating new blog content takes significant effort and some talent/interest - as your post alludes to. Some people will just not be cut out for it. Since the ROI on time spent in Steemit is very low, the attrition rate will be high. So, what do some of us do? We wing it - with short content - 2 liner jokes, 1 image or video with a single sentence, etc.
Key factors for success in the long-term will require persistence, some short-term tactics (SP leasing, autobots, etc) before they get frowned upon or flagged and earnings growth to negate belief erosion.
Thank you for your helpful post & congratulations on sustaining your momentum for more than 15 months!
All of those approaches are just crutches and a way to avoid the real work of creating content that engages people. I have seen accounts with 12,000 followers that still only make less than 1 sbd because those followers don't really read that person's posts. Don't be lazy. Do the work and build something lasting that grows organically.