It is confusing to get at first, but it's actually down to how much steem power the users overall have that are voting in the other topics. So you could have 1000 potentially upvoting but because they haven't bought any steem power the authors get barely any payout.

Now I thought about this, it might seem 'unfair' at first, but it's actually a good way of weeding out any chance of brigaders or bot voting. At the very least. People trying to con the system would have to spend money on it if they wanted to upvote specific users for no reason and just get all the steem for themselves. It also means that people who don't contribute anything and just want to spam won't get payouts either because in theory when you think about it people who actually have something invested in the network won't want to fuck around.

I can certainly empathise with your frustration. I have seen may one liners with pictures making hundreds and you start to question ...Why.
Amazes me how may recipes get as much votes and you start to think is that what people want. Unfortunately I havent got a solution to your issue but wait and see what answers you get because you are raising valid points

It all depends on the voting power of those who voted and possibly a few whales swimming by at the right time. The more people build up their steempower and the price of steem rises the more the rewards peoples votes will give.

You got an upvote by the Steem Trail for the mentioned article - many users would appreciate that. Furthermore you got more than 50 views which means a really good (far above average) view/vote ratio. You are complaining on an high level though ;-)

It's a fact of life on here. There are hundreds of voting bots with very little SP. Their votes are worth less than one from a whale. I don't even know why they bother as their curation rewards will be tiny. Just keep on doing good posts and engage with people. It will pay off.

Because the developers and insiders with the most money are the only ones that can really give awards. It is intentionally biased toward the insiders and built for them to make money off of voting with their voting bots and alternate accounts. They have ignored requests for voting fairness and even a simple tip button for over 4 months now.

All it would take to fix the unfairness you just noticed, is a TIP BUTTON. 

Now watch as the cheerleaders attack and explain this is a good thing, developers are wonderful, and it's in beta.

Look here shla-rafia: https://steemstats.com/#/, even the voters with huge impact have had very less rewards in your posting. Normally they bring 1-5 SBD and now they bring 0.100 and so on (at 100% vote power!).  Maybe all money  has gone?
A lot of things are going wrong here, we don't understand. Some of my posts collect for more than 35 hours, some not. Nothing works real at the momemt. And the whale-theatre is still playing the drama. I hope, they don't damage the system. But maybe it's just the Beta and the lots of recent changes.