Yeah I just checked your YouTube channel and see that you did post a couple of videos about Steemit. I hadn't been notified yet on my phone that you posted those. Silly YouTube not notifying me yet. Jeez.
Also I did see that you were possibly looking for someone to do a collaboration with to answer questions about Steemit. I would be willing to help you out on that. Maybe I can Skype from my pool for a Traditional Pool meeting! Hahahah
So to answer your question about the 7 day payouts. It is a very legitimate concern that you have and one that I certainly had. There was a time about 8 months ago when the payouts were only for 24 hours. They have changed it a couple of times and now it is 7 days but what you notice on here is that pretty much your content is old news after 1 hour unless it hits the trending page. I know that is kind of crazy to hear but it is ultimately true. You have to get to a point where you have a following and people are automatically voting for you with their automated bot driven accounts and also be known to where people are combing through your content looking for the best out of your stuff.
Now don't trip out yet based on what I just said. I could say there are 80 different ways to make money on Steemit but that would sound ridiculous. But as you know from making money online there are so many ways to make money. It would be like someone saying that if Amazon FBA didn't make sense anymore that there would be no way to make money. It might suck if that was a huge part of your success but if you had several different income streams coming in you would still be making Adsense revenue, affiliate commissions, eBay sales...etc...etc..
So to more directly answer your question you get paid out overtime through your STEEM Power. Look at it this way. Let's say you put up your content and earn a payout on it. It will add to your Steem Power. You comment on people's posts. Get paid in Steem Power. Win Games and earn money and maybe power that up into your Steem Power. That Steem Power is going to earn around 15% interest right now / year. So you can pick your strategy. Do you want to defer payment for awhile and have a more powerful upvote and earn the interest or do you want to power down and take a weekly payout?
Also as your Steem Power get's stronger you can earn more on curation rewards from upvoting people. A lot of the big players in here with powerful accounts are just earning money passively through the system from interest on their Steem Power and curation rewards that they are earning off of an autovoting bot.
So here is the thing. I never put $1 into this system from the outside because I knew that if a person couldn't come here with my content creation skills and make money then there would be no way it would work. I made money..... traded to BTC on Poloniex, sent that to GDAX and started cashing out to prove to myself it was real. Most of my money on here has been created by building up with the content creation skills but let's say you want to skip a lot of those steps. Let's say you caught a huge ride in Etherium and wanted to deversify into STEEM and make yourself way more powerful and automatically pay yourself more money on each of your posts. You could certainly do that.
But your main passive ways to make money on here are Powering down your Steem Power which takes 3 months, Earning Interest on Steem Power, operating upvoting curation bots, Renting out Steem Power, making loans on here.