You are 100% right, most people think there is a quick way to get Steem, there isn't one, just grind grind grind, i look at steem has a sort of mmorpg, where i grinded for hours just to get a piece of an armour for my mage, i need to keep posting and power up posting and powering up, sooner or later i'll be big.

Some things people don't do is to use steemauto to always upvote x, y, z person, i have around 5 ppl that i autoupvote and get the curation reward from them, it might not seem much but at least when i'm busy and can't vote or post, which happened the last 2 months, i still get the curation reward!

People might think it's only 0.01steem per day, but those 0.01 steem powered up get an inflation and the snowball starts rolling and then you realise you have soo much Steem powered up that you can actually start taking some of your profits out!!