I suspect you are right about people creating their own networks, beyond the country trails (I see Australia has a good one going, and there must be others out there). I have not figured out yet how not to miss a post from someone I'm interested in, because our feeds get filled with resteems. I've picked up a lot of interesting new people to follow from those resteems, but it has been at the expense of losing the people I was originally following. I don't like setting up parallel systems and would like it if the user interface allowed me to filter "Following - original posts" and "Following - resteems" from my Feed. Have no idea whether that's been suggested, worked on, rejected or what!

In any case, thank you for the kind words. I started out last year with good intentions, flopped, came back by upvoting, commenting and resteeming, got over my lack of skills with handling images (ongoing theme) and just got back into it. I'm here for the long term so am not aiming for the $1000 posts. I like getting feedback from real people and connecting with them over things we're both interested in. That to me is genuine, different value that Steemit offers.