You would never earn a penny if you don't have someone who would like to vote on your content.

Too bad that currently "someone" means someone with a lot of power, which in turn realistically means a bot, because otherwise we're back to not a single penny.

But for original, high quality content there's a better chance to lure voters because it increase probability that ... it will lure even more voters.

Technically yes, in practice high quality alone is orders of magnitude not enough to matter. Votes of "common" people are literally meaningless, you would require dozens of them to cross the payout threshold (and I assume that after HF it will be even more). Literally the only chance at getting literally anything is to be somehow noticed by someone powerful or to get an upvote from a bot. So far the latter is infinitely more probable and usually absolutely independent of quality.

So yes, once you get that, high quality might help in propelling you even further, but without a random boost there's absolutely nothing in there for you. If you want any sort of gains then if you have to choose between focusing on getting bots' attention and doing high quality stuff, the former is the obvious choice.

All in all a casual user has nothing to do here - either scroll some Hot/Promoted, where first and foremost promoted stuff is, quality being only secondary, thus not really attractive in general, or scrape the rusty bottom of the barrel in New, which is pretty much entirely uncurated, because why would anyone bother, there is literally nothing to gain here and the quality is mediocre 99% of the time.

If you ask me why I'm here in the first place, well I gave up any hope for Steem as a content/social platform and now I'm just curious to see a how this failed experiment is going. Even though it's failed, it's still interesting to see how it fails.