You are right on the 95% of his payouts coming from 2 or 3 people and to be honest with you I'm in a very similar scenario as well. A lot of us honestly are even when we have been around for a long time and have a solid follower count. It really comes down to a few accounts upvoting us with any strength and what I envisioned originally is that overtime the following would grow bigger and bigger and as people accumulated more power even if you were getting 5 or 10% upvotes from people it would ultimately add up across hundreds or thousands of votes. But that hasn't been the case at all
And I'm sure you have seen a lot of the people commenting and not upvoting the post and a lot of times the people doing that don't really have hardly any power anyways. It is like they are hogging their 200 SP. It doesn't make a lot of sense.
I get what you are saying with not really wanting "stars" to come. I also had that feeling last summer. I was thinking that I didn't really care if STEEM was a small ecosystem as long as we were all making money and having a good time. But what I have noticed is that it is getting harder to make much even at higher price levels because more and more people are joining in from around the world and also there are people really draining the reward pool. So before it might have been still somewhat lucrative to push through and be posting at $1 STEEM prices but now even when it was $1.50 it was looking pretty bad. Even with my own vote and a few others it was putting my post around a couple of dollars and if it wasn't for some of the extra help it really wouldn't have made sense.