I appreciate that you bring up a point that, as far as I know, nobody has ever argued with, but the #newsteem team has consistently just decided to ignore: there simply aren't enough whales with a diverse set of interests to support a broad range of quality content here. Sportsbetting, even as a whole, is a great example. I don't think there's any whale who cares about sportsbetting, much less your rather niche sportsbetting. I don't think there's anyone with a meaningful vote who knows or cares much about advantage gambling at all, the largest after you probably being either me or @gank depending on how you want to count what SP is where, and I learned long ago that voting is pointless. (Gank isn't much of a voter either.)
So the whole idea of quality content being supported falls apart, or boils down to "you should really be posting about blockchain and/or libertarianism" because those are the subjects we actually have a population of voting SP that particularly and reliably cares about. The quality of your posts on those topics is irrelevant because nobody has the expertise to evaluate them.
None of this has ever been a secret, they just decided that their thing was going to work anyway because reasons.