People consider my photo posts to be shitposts, and I rarely get over 20 cents, no matter how long they are, how good the photos are, and how clever the captions are.

I haven't seen any of your photo posts, and I would question anyone who considered them spam or shitposts if they were an honest attempt at creating content and telling a story.

...and thereby pillaging value from other posts, such as mine

I don't really know what to say to you here, but it's a valid question. If you feel my post is overvalued, downvote it. I don't decide how my post gets voted or how much of the pool gets sent to me. I certainly don't solicit votes, bot them, or trade them. I've even been dwindling down my self vote on top of that. It is a social network at its core. It's not always vote the post, it's also vote the person. What I do is network a lot outside of steem on discords, etc. I'm in anti-abuse and curation communities, and I take stands and am outspoken on issues here that get me noticed and more followers with more stake. I also occasionally get my posts downvoted to hell by those that disagree because of some of those stands as well.

I bought quite a bit of steem and I power it all up(except for steem monsters cards), and you can see on both my accounts I follow trails and delegate out a lot of it to projects and initiatives. Most of my voting with this account, I vote very inefficiently because I'd rather support people such as yourself instead of maximizing my milking the system. For the most part my votes are very asymmetric, I stopped voting steem related posts any higher than 10%, because I want to see more non-steem related content here. I also keep on buying STEEM. I just bought 2k more today and powered it up on @joshmania. That might have something to do with getting noticed more too.

To be honest, I personally only care that my posts don't get zero'd out. It's just fun to document my experience on a blockchain in addition to my website. I care more about the unit price of steem going up in value, than getting more of the inflation. That being said, whatever inflation I do earn, I'm going to try to put it to good use.

But like I said, if you feel it is over-rewarded compared to similar posts, downvote it. I'm not going to judge you for it or retaliate. But know there are others on steem actually trading votes with other whales and orcas for 3-4 times the rewards who would do both to you. Would you be consistent and take that same stand against them?

Thanks for the opportunity to really think about this topic and challenge my assumptions. I hope that my response will accomplish the same for you.