One of the best reasons to stay on steem and continue creating content was our @steemromania community. And you are correct that getting involved in such communities is a great way to get engagement and some upvotes, there are also a number of minnow support projects like @qurator or curation projects like @currie. These are worth investigating.

But the road to high post returns is quite long and needs a lot of patience and relationship building. Also posting on platforms like @dtube, that have a lot of SP to do curation, can help.