I sympathize with your experience. I went through the same when started few months ago. My advice would be to not spend too much time and exhaust your creativity/ideas right now. Just write shorter and valuable posts. Most importantly, try to build your network of loyal followers through interacting in chat. Once you build your decent following, then you could start writing longer posts without being afraid of having them go unnoticed. I made a mistake exhausting a lot of ideas and creativity in the beginning. Often writing long posts, sometimes spending 5-6 hours writing and getting few votes only. These ideas are lost for Steemit as it is not welcome to recycle old posts.
Bot creation abuse is a problem.