about who knows you and how big is your wallet.
I think "or" is more fitting there rather than "and" because they don't have to be mutually exclusive, if you do both well, then sure, you can do really well here with post rewards but it's not always for granted. We have plenty of whales who get less rewards than minnows, even newcomers if they're content and effort behind networking is outstanding.
You last sentence makes more sense, yes. The issue I had with a comment earlier is that they think curation is broken because it's not fair constantly or that it has to always depend on the content. That's not how things work and I kind of don't mind that it doesn't work that way cause it's another thing that sets curation on Hive aside from the rest of revenue such as from ads in web2. Being able to gain influence by buying and powering up a lot of stake is one of the most underrated and underused values of the ecosystem. Take people like @theycallmedan for instance, it's not like he had a lot of following outside of Hive when he started, he also didn't have any projects or plans or a following here. He powered up a lot and the important thing here is that he used his power well. To grow projects, grow other net positive users aiding him with his vision and plans and now he's one of the most famous users in the ecosystem. Meanwhile there's been whales like Bernie, Transisto, etc, who've done close to nothing with their stake other than upvoting "content" or people and not that many care about them (sure there will always be some who pretend to care in hopes of favors in return, etc, but that's one of the side-effects of having a lot of stake).
Lastly, you don't need to have a lot of stake or power up a lot to become "famous", that's the other side of the network that enables people to earn and gain attention through their activities and history of the account and it's really one of the beauties of Hive that you don't see in many other places.