I didn't even realise it had been going for that long. I would be the same as yourself and in summer am a lot busier so I don't really go onto the site much at all. Now that the weather has gone bad I spend a lot more evenings in the house so my interaction has gone up accordingly.
What I have noticed from the few weeks I've been following the league is that it gets tougher every week. When I compared the points over a few weeks you needed a higher amount every time to make the top twenty. Obviously the new people joining every week have driven up the competition massively. I can only imagine how big the difference is since you joined 34 weeks ago. I think that we all hope the price goes back up since the motivation between seeing one cent votes to ten cent is a huge difference.
The vote price difference is a big thing. And yes the engagement levels are increasing it seems every week. Not so much for the award of being in the top ten of the league, I think it is just that people are learning that it really is okay to make a comment on a post. It took me when I first joined steemit a little bit to get into the flow of leaving comments, and then I had a comment flagged, and that slowed my commenting down somewhat, but I quickly overcame that minor set back and moved on and decided I was going to look at steemit as they advertised it to me a Social Crypto site, so I started trying to be more social, If I read an Authors story and I liked it and I voted on it by god I had a right to comment on it, and I did, on a lot of Stories. Steemit has some amazing story tellers, and they like getting feed back. I thought that was great when i first joined. Now I have gotten so busy on steemit that I rarely have time to read some of the stories, but I still do on occasion. Anyway that was how I first got into commenting.
Like I said, I think more and more people are seeing steemit as more than a Cryptocentric environment, people are starting to have fun and enjoy themselves here. We all at one time or another want to share our thoughts and opinions on things that others say.