I empathise with what you are saying but I have one piece of advice:

Post what you care about. Not what you think the whales will like.

Build your own audience and in the future (assuming Steemit succeeds) you will reap the rewards. Now that may seem like too much work on something that is a gamble - but go back to any startup in the early days - Apple, Google, Facebook and they were in a very similar position.

Also you may not realise it but you are one of the pioneers just by virtue of being here now. - The equivalent of people mining/buying bitcoin in 2009/2010.

By being here now you still have the potential to be a future whale. You probably won't have a stake the size of what Dan or Ned have (none of us will) but it could still be worth more than anything else you have invested in.

It might not happen but ask yourself what if it did?

What if you gave up and left your chance to make hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars because you got disheartened and did the equivalent of exchanging 10K BTC for a pizza?

For me that would be more galling than just taking the risk and losing some time and money. Maybe I am just weird though.