Very limited is not the best words to use there

I still stand by my words, even if every author was a "good author", we still have very few.

simply because their posts consistently got overlooked and were never curated 'properly' as they should have been

Really you mean as they feel it should have been. There is no "should have been" here. I've seen a duct tape meme get voted $943, and good posts make less than $1. You have to put in the work in any social media before you build an audience. That involves posting and engaging consistently. Social media is hard, yet Hive is still far easier than any I have seen do to the lack of competition, but it is far from fair.

Some even sit at 100% VP/Mana for days until one of their 'whale' friends makes a post.

The first half of this statement is a gift to the community, the second half is depressing.

The 'whales' would rather just support the 'whales' so they can remain the 'whales'. Sure a few reached 100+ dollars - but only because of bidbots. Not a single actual whale vote aside from grumpycat who thought I made too much on it.

I disagree, I don't do this, and most of the whales I know don't do this. There are not many of us. It isn't usually whales doing this, it's dolphins and orcas. A lot of the whales are in fact spreading their votes very thin to optimize curation or voting a group of favored authors (potentially friends). I don't see the behavior you describe often at the whale level.

I used to write massive stories that took hours to compose between gathering proper graphics and making it 'pretty'.

This is a systemic problem on Hive, people think because they do something they are owed something. Unless you have a contract, then it is up to the community to decide what it is worth. But I will agree 100% there is no consistency in voting based on quality here. This is a result of decentralization, favoritism, ulterior motives, and just poor content discovery options. EIP has done wonders for helping in this department, many more stakeholders are voting outside of their circles. It isn't perfect but the end result has been a vast improvement over Old Steem. No change we make will ever get us to where we want to be, but if we can get closer that is an improvement.