It's true here in steemit, the same as it is in other social media or old skool media (songs on the radio, TV, movies) or even ideas in politics, religion or even science. What is high quality is often not the same as what is popular.
I'm a niche participator, I only comment and up vote lately. Yes I have been on the trending page, long time ago. I don't know if my stories were quality or all that popular, but I thought they were passable! :-) I did plan to write something of quality to the best of my limited writing skills, and it worked out well. Possibly because it was the early days here and not a lot of competition, but it wasn't empty here either. Stellabelle was here and many other good writers. OK, done rambling! Thanks for your thoughtful article!
Thanks for the thoughtful comment @kenny-crane.
I've been doing the blogging gig for some 20-odd years and even though I have pursued that "popular content" angle a couple of times (not very successfully) I find that I just don't care... so I write "from the heart" about things that happen to interest me, or I feel passionate about, or I have a measure of expertise in. I wrote a pretty good piece on stamp collecting here... but who cares? But I had fun putting it together, and don't regret doing so and feel happy to have it as a part of my "body of work."
With reading/curating it's the same, for me... I manually read and vote on quite a few things, and leave quite a few comments... just because I like learning interesting and unusual things, and I like leaving the creator a little "footprint" to let them know that I appreciated their effort.