Love your "Upvote often" ideology. Agree. :D

That said, another reason posts get neglected is coz Steem lacks some of the "Discovery Vector" mechanisms that other social platforms have.
(They help content get discovered. )

Some discovery patterns on other platforms:

• prominent notifications (both badge-ish on site/app, and email... I don't even know to peep a new follower's posts because it's not obvious when I get a new follower)
• reshare gestures (retweet/repin/reblog)
• suggested/related/recommended content (YouTube great example. Medium not bad, either)
• non-buried Trends/Trending feed (steem does have a trending feed, but it trends individual posts as opposed to themes/topics. Upsides and downsides to this.)
• prominent feed informed by social graph
• other suggestions informed by social graph
• better search w/more structured into in SERPs

For anybody lurking this thread and finding it interesting, I recommend checking out the world of "mechanism design" (part of world of game theory). I'm just an amateur reader about it, but I use it all the time w/I think about social platforms for work stuff.

I'll post soon about this stuff on my steem blog (which is mostly about social platforms and media distribution).