One of the struggles for the 'established' content producers is that there is no establishment to support them as most of the SP is distributed by bidbots on very little of value content.

The curation projects generally target retention of people who will only be retained if earning Steem which is impossible for as more people arrive to compete, they will not have the power to reward enough consistently. And as you mentioned, they get gamed by people targeting them.

For a couple of months, I was considered a 'high earner' but this of course disappeared as the available manual curation pool shrank into near extinction. The support I get now and the once all important engagement, has come through a mass of effort and expenditure of personal resources (time and energy) yet, it is unlikely to ever be enough to actually compete in the marketplace as it is dominated by opportunists and blind votes cast.

I don't have answers for this but, Steem is not a charity, it has to tie value to content through an organic community in the same way an algorithm may exclude content on another platform.

Many of the 'power accounts' are down because (like @guiltyparties said) they often relied on their benefactors and became complacent within the community. Many rarely engaged well with the community other than those who could add value to their post. Not all mind you.

I can't offer much but I do my best to get to as many comments as I can possibly reply to (depending on personal circumstances) because it is there that real retention can be made as it engages an audience without offering masses of Steem value. Long-term retention is in relationship and experience, not upvotes.

Yes, I would love to have more large accounts choose (the rare few who care about content do) to support me or a curation project drop a vote from time to time. But, for now, I will continue to rely heavily on the community to keep me here producing and, do my best to support other people who are thinking long-term also as I think it is the best way to make this place a power in the future markets.

In comparison to some platforms, I (and others similar) may be over-rewarded but, in relation to Steem, there is a whole slew of low-value content rewarded heavily while the real content goes begging in the streets with a community who largely walks on by. This needs to change as it is the content that will eventually set the standards and, engage the users as in time, there will not be enough SP to share to offer value to all.

Setting this process now by rewarding consistent, long-term, quality content producers will mean that those who come in will have to outperform them which will ramp up content quality again. I can't wait for the day that Trending is filled with content producers who create work that I just say wow about because it means that the system has driven quality to the top organically and that is when Steem has proved itself.

Right now, new users come in and see the low quality that earns and says, I can produce that, and they all can. It is competition at the bottom of the barrel.