Hive Power does directly control how much resource credits you have.
The voting on comments and such, that all depends on the person. Some people just focus on writing posts and not interacting with commentors. Others I have seen don't post a lot of articles but mostly stick to interacting with other posts, etc
But also yea, voting on a post/article/comment/etc takes time to recharge so people could just just giving out a few high weighted votes instead of a lot of lower weighted votes
Okay so I ended up buying a few HIVE in Binance and staking them so I can posta little more. It's a bit of a frustrating experience for new users who just want to get going. And getting the boost from Ecency for 9 bucks feels a little expensive for someone who doesn't know if they want to stay and if that's worth the spend.
I guess I'll be posting and voting more now ;-)