Myeah some people do get paid more "guaranteed" ways, mostly due to autovotes or then some kind of vote trading handshakes, which I'm not really a fan of neither. But point stands that the autovotes can still scale differently rather than just placing some "milestones" like, you have to reach 5million views to get paid some crumbs.

While it's all crumbs we're getting now, as an example taking a look at your latest post, $17 today is not much, but you're still getting that in Hive, which at quick maths means almost 150 hive in author rewards which if you wait for better days can become a lot more than $8.50.