You are entirely correct, especially re: J. Wildfire, who (love her or hate her) should be making bank. There is something wrong with a platform in which you can have 7.6K "followers" like I do and make $350 a month, publishing several times a week. The crack about "maybe you're not as good as you think you are" is absurd and fairly insensitive since it applies to 99.9% of Medium writers. What gets read in mainstream pubs? Often--click bait and celebrity news. Medium has no filter to promote quality because they don't care--they are a platform and that is all. This is the gig economy and worse, the gig writing economy.