>Self-sustaining community effort? Good luck with that.

Hope so. We don't need a lot of names to be alive. We just need people that care enough. 

>I rarely receive real, human comments under my posts.

It's natural and that's how real and valued engagement is to the platform. Engagement is more important than the upvotes one gets because it's all empty victory if nobody bothers to comment on your work after having so many accounts upvote it. 

>So much for the community effort.

It's a given. But these people would not understand how simple engagement on strangers can affect their routine on the platform. I haven't been active in the platform due to real life drama but when I was, I used to be dropping several comments on curation spree. They do return the favor back and most don't but I get a few followers and that's good enough for me. 

I delegated to steem-ua which adds my ranking whenever I have new followers, in exchange, the upvote weights on the program gets higher for me. They don't need to engage with me  but their follows help me for a long time.