Thanks for your reply.  I'm glad to hear you are finding that you are still gaining SP since the changes.  

I've been here since 2017 on and off, never giving up on it as such, but just having various other things going on in life and having more or less time for it depending on these things.  It's hard to be patient when nothing is working out right (and the changes to Steem came at a bad time and were a straw on a camel's back that was already broken) and I know the solution is not getting rich quickly (though ofc I wouldn't exactly complain if I won lotto or something), but I also KNOW now that the solution IS to be able to live off of my art rather than other sources.  However, I think I've overall been relatively patient with Steem (and the other platforms I've been on).  

Patience isn't the issue here.  I don't care if it makes it take a smidgen longer.  It just seems quite possible that maybe there was another solution that didn't include making it harder for the little guys, and if there was another solution that didn't include making posts that make less than 20 steem make even less, and it didn't screw over another group on here in a similar manner, then that would have been the better and more moral solution to use.   They probably had to do something but I just don't know if they did the right thing and I'd avoid the change that made posts making 20 steem now make less if it was unavoidable and an equally good or better solution was available.  I can speculate but I can't know if there was a better solution without having access to all of the information that could possibly inform that decision, but either way, it's still annoying.  

I've seen YouTube go to complete shit for all creators but especially smaller creators, and I do not want to see this happen to Steem.  I mostly just hope that this isn't the start of trend, like YouTube's response to the first adpocalypse was the start of a trend of them making it harder for creators while bending over backwards for advertisers.  This is a different situation but it could still follow a trend and I hope we don't see that happen.  

Truthfully though it is frustrating that it is so often the little people who cop it the most from changes.  It is also frustrating trying to get ahead and having spanner after spanner after spanner thrown in the works (this change only being one, but that doesn't mean people aren't struggling with other challenges at the same time this one was thrown in).  

I do care about my business growing and doing well as I very strongly feel that my business is the way I will truly succeed at life.  However, I'd just keep going along and trying to make Steem work for me.  My major concern with this was about how I won't necessarily be able to support other people as well as I'd like because popularity matters now.  

I have just kept supporting creators and content I like, actually even more so, not because of the changes but because my life situation changed and I have more time to both create and curate atm than not so long ago and I'm mostly just moving forward, and still only voting for what I want to vote for (and hoping that the person benefits from it if their content doesn't become popular) but I'm still not sure that I agree with the change made to Steem.  We will see over time how this change, and future changes go.  

As for quality content, it is more subjective than popularity because popularity we can track with numbers and statistics.  Whether we think should be popular or not is very subjective though as we will all differ in this regard.      

Going from what you've said in your comment, honestly, I care about proof reading and spelling but nowhere near as much as I care about the meaning within whatever is written.   It does impact quality but I'd class a post full of spelling errors but with meaningful or thought provoking or funny etc content as being higher quality than a post that has no spelling errors but also isn't good or interesting in terms of what the content actually is.  Ideally a post would have both, but grammar and spelling means a lot less to me than the content itself and wouldn't hold as much weight in determining if something is quality compared to the meaning within the content.  

People don't agree on quality nor how much effort is put into artistic work.   I have seen people (quite powerful people if I remember correctly) make comments on Steemit in the past about how they won't upvote videos without a significant amount of text with them.  I prefer some text because it helps verify that they actually created the video and didn't just steal it and post it to earn from someone else's work but I wouldn't need a significant amount of text to find a video post to be quality, because I know how much work goes into making videos and often more time and work goes in to making my videos than it does to making written posts on here.  

A good example is from YouTube creators.  A lot of other YouTube creators look down on lets plays because they think they are "low effort content".  In terms of videos, for the most part I make lets plays, animations and robotics videos.  My lets plays do take less effort than animation but they are far from low effort content.  The most recent gaming video I edited had about 8 - 10 hours spent on editing it.  Some take more and some take less but lets plays and gaming videos aren't automatically low effort content, but some people see it that way.  

Between the views I've seen of gaming content by other video creators and the views I've seen expressed on here about video focused posts, I don't think quality is that objective and I don't think it is obvious for the most part whether someone puts care into what they produce.  

Obviously posts that are one sentence, and not even a sentence that means anything significant, or straight up scams (I did downvote someone at one point for sharing a vbucks scam) would fall into the not quality / don't put care into what they produce category, but beyond the most obvious examples, I don't think it's clear whether people put care into what they produce or not and I feel certain that individuals underestimate the amount of work and care that goes into some types of art that maybe they aren't as familiar with the process of creating.  

While it certainly improves quality, I personally could not put proof reading and spelling above the actual guts or meaning of a piece of content though.  It just isn't anywhere near as important as what is actually contained within that piece of writing in my opinion.