Let me make an effort to inflate you then, and explain how you too are benefiting from my set-up.

Currently, competition on Gridcoin is still relatively low. It is increasing rapidly, but we are very much in the early days. As more and more people join the team, we will be increasing the compute power of the network. This means competition for the GRC minted every day goes up.

As a result of it being harder to mint Gridcoin, the price of Gridcoin will rise. It will further rise when research teams start using it to incentivise crunchers to compute for their specific project.

Compute added to network --> GRC price goes up

Every Gridcoin you possess or mine now, you will be able to sell for easily ten times that in future. This is thanks to competition from set-ups like mine. To add to that, there are set-ups running BOINC outside Team Gridcoin that utterly dwarf mine - soon enough they will join as well.

Your results are far from disappointing - they are just 'normal'. Almost everyone on Team Gridcoin will have a set-up similar to yours. You're doing great! Also, remember that research is not paid out from when you join, but from when you staked the noobie block. So, whatever you earned was earned between 6/17 and 7/27.