It is definitely hard to get anywhere on Steem, I've been a member for four months now and thanks to some curation efforts, I have made a little bit from my writing. It's not impossible, but you have to work hard and sadly if you want true visibility you have to use bid bots or be fortunate enough to get some whale upvotes on your posts to push them into trending.
SMT's are going to increase competition here, but the upside is the platform will grow and by extension the value of STEEM should go up because more people are using it on the platform, buying it to power up and so on. It's a win-win in the end.