(Hope my followers don’t read this) but your number of followers really doesn’t matter, especially since many of them are just trying to get more followers themselves and have no actual intention of reading your stories. These are what I call “fake followers”.

I’ve done plenty of math and statistics on my own stories as well as others for publications that I’m an editor for, and realized many of the same things you did. My takeaways based on my own stats are: 1) Curation matters (as your already mentioned) and does improve views/reads, 2) Publications improve views/reads similar to curation, but there’s not a significant difference between large and small publications in terms of views/reads, 3) Write awesome, engaging, high quality stories and people will read them, regardless of the number of followers you have.