Frederick
After four years, I have 331 articles and 8831 responses, most belonging to my main idea. So, like you, I have done a few things right--and yet have failed to get a high ranking in the feeds.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of us in this position. I attribute our poor traction mostly as a case of oversupply of good writers.
However, I do believe that Medium gives an advantage to its top writers. And recently, I have formulated a hypothesis as to "why?". There will be an article to come out next week on this hypothesis.