If your content sucks you're just going to get a bunch of readers but no views. Also, don't forget that what some people think is good (aka what they like) may be different from your opinions.
Maybe, but I think that's only really true for the established stories. For new stories most of the time I see them stuck at 50-200 daily views and are basically just getting ignored forever. To me that's not an issue of good or bad content, but an issue of advertising.
A new story is at a huge advantage if you can get an initial view bump, I don't know exactly how the algorithm works, so I don't know if that's the age of a story, popularity metrics, or a mix of both, but I have seen enough to know that already popular stories do not get trending very often, especially in the #1,#2,#3 slots which are the first recommendations given to mobile users. These trending stories are almost always very new ones, not to mention you only have a shot at trending once every two days.
If you can get trending immediately after launching a story, your story almost certainly sit up on that spot for weeks on end. Getting 10x-100x the traffic it would normally get. The effects from this are usually long lasting.
