One good thing that came out of this discussion was for people to be aware of the dust threshold and adjust their voting behaviour.
People would try to make sure that their comment upVote was more than 0.02.
Also one of the witnesses developed the @dustsweeper this service would go on and upvote comments that you have and make sure that they didn't turn to dust.
It is a sad thing that we realized that Steem is all about DPOS delegated proof of Stake and that your SP is determined by how much your are willing to invest.
Yes you can choose not to invest Fiat but in. Order to grow your account you have to invest a lot of time .
Thanks for the reply. I certainly got straightened out on upvoting, will be more careful now. Coincidentally, I joined @dustsweeper yesterday, it seems like a good start.
Yes, you are quite correct, to be successful here will take time and/or money, but I suppose that's true for everything. Cheers!