I think 'tiered patronage' is about the best two-line descriptor of how distribution of rewards on hive ACTUALLY works, at least it's the best I can come up with for now, I'm sure that'll evolve into something better.
The reason I say this is that most of the long-term regular Witnesses and authors have managed to gain the patronage of one or more Whale or Orca accounts that....
- For Witnesses simply vote their witness to bring them into the T20 or T50 which allows them to make a significant profit (in the case of the T20) or break even plus a small profit (in the case of the T50 or thereabouts).
- For Authors - regularly upvote them with sufficient HP to give them a regular, reliable income that makes posting on a daily (it's usually daily) basis worthwhile.
I use the term 'Patron' because a patron is a wealthy person (/account) who is prepared to sponsor/ fund an individual/ individuals on a regular basis - the Patron supports an individual they think has promise doing something they value and they carry on providing funding as long as they deem the services/ content that individual is performing to be worthwhile/ and up to a certain standard.
Of course there's no necessity in this system that the person/ account being patronised is doing anything worthwhile or good - it maybe that the Patron just likes them (or their parents) and will just go on providing funding WHATEVER that person does.
NB I can't help but think here of various Dickens novels - wealthy characters being the benefactors of poorer characters is a constant theme in his novels, and the receipt of patronage isn't always just!
Decentralised (ish) Patronage...
But the Dickens analogy doesn't quite do it because on Hive there is a larger role played by medium sized and smaller accounts (plural) such that most successful authors and witnesses have multiple regular Patrons.
This is most definitely true of Authors who receive regular votes from several people with different interests - and this is further decentralised with Hive-engine token 'second layer' tribes, and sometimes facilitated by curation accounts that are controlled by more than one person, which in turn might be Powered by delegations, but I still think 'Patronage' works to describe what's going on.
Patronage of Authors....
If you look at the top earners on Hive from 
Now it's fairly obvious from the meaningful comment to vote ratio on TM's posts that the majority of people don't watch his videos or read his content (you can say the same of anyone, TM's just unlucky enough to be P1) - but that is also completely irrelevant in a patronage system - patrons don't necessarily pay per view for specific content and most regular voters, including who ever controls the LV account will just check in periodically to see if TM is still 'on task' so to speak (i.e. not turned abuser) and if so keep their votes on.
Unless in the meantime someone has started producing better, regular content, in which case TM's patrons may switch their alliances.
In fact with TM it's possible that the enormous LV vote he receives every day is a kick-back for his large LEO holding - and if this is the case this is also largely irrelevant, Patrons can do what they like with their stake for whatever reason!
Another example of how patronage works (and works well) is with 
Now I could give more examples, but the chances are if you scrawl through ANY author who gets decent rewards on a regular basis you'll find they have 'Patrons' who are Whales and Orcas.
We also see this Patronage system at work in the recent voting for Ukraine posts - a way of supporting citizens is to upvote their content.
Patronage of Witnesses..
You also see a kind of higher level of Patronage with the witnesses...
To become a T20 witness you NEED (currently) the Patronage of 
That's just a fact of the way HP is currently distributed.
NB It's also true to say that a Trades vote won't guarantee you a T20 Witness position either...
Now I'm not a technical expert so I don't deem to know why Trades votes for what witnesses - he'll have his own reasons, but that's his right - his stake - and he gets to control the consensus because he's the only person prepared to hold such an ENORMOUS amount of Hive.
It could be that the people he votes for really are DEDICATED Hive Witnesses with the knowledge and understanding to FIX things if anything goes wrong, rather than just those who run a 'Hive in a Box' node?
That's just the way it is ATM. We would need a second 20M HP account for patronage of Witnesses to be more decentralised - even 
Having said that pretty much every T20 Witnesses also depends on MORE Hive Power than Trades has from other accounts to gain consensus - so Patronage of Trades is necessary but not sufficient.
Patronage on Hive - Final Thoughts...
Of course with voting on content there is manual curation, some people vote more widely and more sporadically, but honestly, trawl people's votes on their content - it's usually a case of same old same old, but I'll grant the fact that Patronage doesn't necessarily explain ALL of what gets on Trending, voting is also more random sometimes!
And maybe Patronage isn't such a bad thing - it gives a bit of stability rather than your income being up and down all the time - something which could be important with witnesses given their crucial role in the chain.
NB my aim here isn't to criticise, just to come up with an accurate descriptor of how things work on Hive - and to my mind 'Patronage' is it!
As a final word.... one interesting parallel with Patronage in Dickens' is that you don't necessarily know who are Patrons are, and you might not necessarily be that impressed when you find out...
