First of all: your long articles deserve to be trending in my opinion.
And I have to admit I am happy for every long article I can find here (if it's well written). Anyway the site is full of memes, one-image-'articles' and jokes.
Finally it's a matter of taste and of course writing short posts (plus upvoting them) is an ideal method to earn more within a shorter timescale and in addition it can be very entertaining.
Altogether I doubt that the 'circles', you described very well in your article (in case one has not enough 'circle-friends' instead of that socket puppets will do the job) as well as extensive direct self-voting lead to a communicative platform which attracts new investors and thus leads to an increasing Steem price.
Even if I profit myself (short-term) from the current system I would try to make extensive self-voting respectively using multiple accounts or being a 'circle-member' less attractive by the idea of diminishing returns.
In my article I explained it like this: "How about if after each vote on a specific account (including ones own account) each further vote on the same account would lead to significantly less curation reward for the voter and less profit for the upvoted account? Thus, when upvoting an account which I had already upvoted before, my voting power would be smaller than in case I upvote an account which I didn't upvote before."
I wonder what you think about that idea and hope this text was not too long now ... :-)