I personally don’t mind things being more casual as long as no one steals information and artwork from others, but yes, there aren’t plenty of garbage posts that do much better than quality posts.
It sounds like you need a better understanding of the ecosystem. I’m not sure if it’ll give you peace of mind or make you feel worse :-P I think one attitude people take, which is fine by me, is that people choose users they like and support them as individuals rather than just based on each post. The problem I see is that a lot of that is done with hopes of gaining on curation rewards, not based on quality, therefore, that method seems to disproportionately benefit larger users, hence we sometimes talk about “circle jerks”. I don’t think autovoting is ideal for this platform, but it’s not the worst thing either, it’s kind of like a monthly payment subscription to your friends work, which I think is fine as long as you don’t use your whole salary on it, or if you do it just for curation rewards.
The comment was probably Auto-upvoted which is why the whale didn’t vote for your post, they didn’t see it.
One more problem with steemit is that many people go to trending or hot to finding content. I think you are better off building a feed full of people you like, frequenting chats to find good users and using tags. In general, No one is going to see your stuff if you don’t have a bunch of followers and you get those by going out and making friends. Also, it says I have 1680 followers, but according to steemitspectacles.com a bunch of them are inactive and for all I know half of them follow everyone. I assume 400-600 would be a more accurate number.