I hear you my friend, and I've been struggling to find the motivation to write much myself. Genuine content producers at dolphin level or below are kind of caught between a rock and a hard place. If you buy votes you get downvoted, but if you don't you are stuck behind the reward curve. Either way, you're not going to earn a financial reward for your effort in this climate.
That said, there aren't many better options around the place and you have a network effect here that is hard to rebuild or transfer to a new platform. I totally understand if you power down (it's what I have done) but stick around with me and lets see if this platform can get to the promised land of genuine curation. Until then, just consider it "audience building" and work on your follower count.
You pretty much summarised it perfectly @buggedout. You won't hear me complain so much about low payouts as I do well enough on Steem in general. The downvotes really are a step too far though making it nearly impossible to get anything going blogging wise. I think the only way genuine cration could work is if it came directly out of people's pockets instead of from the reward pool. Human nature pretty much runs completely against all the current model tries to achieve.