To say that quality content = payout here would be a gross oversimplification. There are two ways to get good payouts. One is to work hard at connecting with other quality posters and gain as many followers as you can, hopefully a few with lots of steem power. If they upvote and resteem you, itll be much easier. The other way is to put a lot of money into your account and make "meh" content.
The good news though, is a lot of people with lots of steem power are pretty solid human beings, I've come across a bunch, but there are a lot of people trying to leech off them and impress them so I think it's better to just be natural and comment on posts that interest you.