I'm okay with that. If I was in it for the money I'd handle my account a lot different than I am. Don't get me wrong the money still matters, but growing it organically over time with people supporting me for being who I am means a lot more than trying to change who I am to get the best rewards. I know you are not advocating this. I am just rambling.

I actually do appreciate your rambling ;). @felixxx made a very similar point that was hard for me to dispute. He is a curator and the creator of @deutschbot that he organicly grew, so he was kind of pissed to see @germain-trail just be made out of nothingness.
The two of them also had a debate that was just an exchange add homines, before that I thought the #deutsch comuunity and their curators are actually quite united.... I was disappointed to say the least.

I spent 3 hours setting up streemian, steemtrail, etc. I am also very technically minded. If it takes that long for someone like me then it is not going to be very accessible to most of the community.

I spectaculary failed at making my Streemian account. I thought I needed to make one for the politics-trail account but I actually did not need to, since it already got one. My personal account is not on Streemian.

Overviews can make a lot of money here if done well, without needing a streemian.

For the sake of transparency let me tell you how the trail works from the inside:

We have 2 official ways of promoting: Voting (like any other acc) and posting it in certain channels of discord (They may or may not get promoted after posting them there). However me and appearently some others trailers thought there might a third. We get high visibility due to the votes on our posts and I thought "hey, why not use that visibility for promotion.

After reading the critics towards that approach I went and looked back at the people I mentioned in my overviews... it was rather disheartening to see them not growing in value, especially the one of new authors.

To present the side of the people who are behind the community-trails, a position that I am actually quite curious to get your opinion on: They see
it as a job and many of them do work hard to be engaging and make valuable posts. Steemtrail in itself can be viewed as a company that has a social/good intended goal - promoting valuable content on Steemit.

Compared to a random real life company Steemtrail seems to be a good thing and I might go back working for them "part-time". My conclusion after all of this is that Steemit in itself is too strongly modeled after reality and doomed if there are no drastic changes. Maybe I will be able to initiate change through the organisation of Steemtrail.