I agree with your points. I post every day, and similar to you, each day I spend from 3 to 4 hours researching and writing the posts. Having my posts not read by most steemians doesn't really bother me though, because the writing I'm doing is just building my own collection for publishing at some point. I'm thinking of publishing a book with my best poems from my daily "Spigot" posts on Amazon sometime soon.
I get such joy from writing that I don't really care that the majority completely ignores them, and satisfied that I'm accomplishing something good for myself.
But I definitely get where you're coming from.