I can say that the quality of the post affect the number of votes and the award not as much as I would like.
Probably, the trends are much more important than the content.
For example on my last posts:
Overpopulation -A full-fledged article $12.35 (with @randowhale vote) wins a bit against a short post with a photo colorchallenge-friday $5.73
You're right, quality seems to be less important than topic. I post articles about gaming or photo's that I feel deserve more than they get sometimes, but then I write something about Steemit, anything really, and suddenly, everyone reads and votes it. I still don't do it a lot though, because well... what the heck is there to write about Steemit every day. It needs to actually make sense that I write about it. If only for my own sense of fairness.