@anyx, I am the newest newbie here and I quite liked your presenting the paradox so succinctly.
I am just a few days old here with 3 blogs to show, the introduction not counting as a blog of any thing more than just my intro.
Trying to relate my thoughts with your Engagement or rewards question, I am heavily inclined towards quality engagement over rewards.
The engagement vs reward works like a farmer vs hunter analogy. The farmer engages his farm, takes his time and over the period of time reaps the fruits of his labor. With hunter it is instant gratification. Hunt, kill, eat. After a day start over again. It's like I post a blog and I need my dollars yesterday. It does not matter what or how. I need my money. And I will do whatever it takes to get that asap.
When I said I am inclined towards engagement, this is what I am attempting here.
No requests to follow me in my blogs: There will never be any mention of that in my posts. I believe, steemians here know the meaning of followed / following very well. If I am able to engage them they will follow, else they will look else where. As of now I have 40 followers many of them being newbies like me. So my influence here is as good as nothing. But that's fine with me. I am in no hurry. Rome was not built in a day. I am a first time blogger. Never ever wrote any stuff earlier. So it is more difficult to engage my readers. I don't know the rules of the game. The rules of engagement. But that's fine. There is always a first time and a beginning. I can live with that.
What some might find annoying here is that I don't resteem the blog. I believe at this juncture with 40 followers and no influence my resteeming won't bring any traction to anyone, instead I run the risk of cluttering my page with resteems and I might lose visibility to my blogs and I am trying to hold it together and keep it tight to make my blogs visible to whoever chances to pass by. When my influence increases I shall consider resteeming other's blogs.
I am also very choosy in following. Only the guys who make an impact on me gets my following. I don't go by the big names and oldies here ( but a lot of them are too good anyway to ignore). So I am running a tight ship here. Now I put my head down and see if I can produce quality content and engage my readers. That's all I am doing here for sometime now. Only time will tell if my strategy stands vindicated or not. So for me engagement Trump's reward 😊 and I also comment a lot, from heart. And my comments are usually long. That's how it has been always. Thanks and feeling good already ☺️