Agree, working the algos and grinding all are important. But I maybe have a more feelings based metric for you. Good content should generate a lot of engagement. And we all know most of the top voted posts in each subcommunity barely get any engagement.
And why is this? Obivously because it's not interesting for them? But to who was it interesting? Would the answer be: 1. curation guild and 2. (a few) whales?
In OCD there was only 1 or two curator who determined which posts would get a vote. And yes after a while we were asked to read through the posts, but honestly who read every post of the other curators?
I don't know what is barely any engagement. I see a lot of posts on trending with 30 or so comments on them. Also if you look at the trending many of these posts are quite fresh, people comment sometimes within a day or more after the post is posted. Many are waiting for a bunch of comments to come in before answering them etc.
In case of OCD you would have to speak with others who are currently involved in the project, I believe OCD had evolved a lot also in how it operates and has many programs to support Hive creators.
It seems you have not been around much to see how all these things developed and evolved, I suggest getting familiar with them once again. I am sure your views would also change once you saw all the recent developments.