Well I tried doing a live finance blog today, and apart from one legit response, I just got a bunch of people saying "upvoted" and earnings of 41 cents for several hours work!
I just don't think there is demand for anything other than articles about steemit.
That is what I am trying to change. The idea is to have $X thousand dollars per day of awards per category. So if your article was in the Top N in that category, you would get a share of the overall pool for that category
and ants.
More seriously, much of this will just have to wait for better platform features, especially following. When a blogger can gain a following they can expect consistent upvotes on every post (unless they fail to deliver value and lose the following). Right now there is no organization to any of it, and much of what happens is just random. The ants post got launched because I upvoted it to remove what I felt was undeserved negative reputation (I thought the post itself was decent too, but nothing special).
It is impossible to make a credible proposal to fix what is broken when what is (allegedly) broken isn't even built yet.