I don't think you should necessarily regret getting the car. Timing has been so tough with crypto for sure. personally I built my account back up in June and July and then started powering down and diversifying those funds which ended up being the right decision because STEEM lagged behind everything else so I made more money in other cryptos. Then when the SBD shot way up I realized that it would pull STEEM up too so I stopped my power down and powered 0.5 BTC up. I have been doing power ups since then but the pain could get pretty serious for sure.
Hopefully things can turn around. I have you on my autovoter but another thing you might want to look into is posting these types of blogs through Busy.org. That is what I do and I get upvotes from busy.pay. They have a lot of delegated power from Steemit Inc so their upvote is worth a decent amount and can get you some better payouts.