Did you look at the voters list before jumping to conclusions?
What really happened is that until yesterday, you had @smooth and @smooth.witness (large whale accounts) upvoting every of your posts. But not anymore from today. That's the reason the payout dropped significantly.
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Sounds like I lost my incentive to create content then.
Did you have @smooth upvoting every of your posts from the very first posts? Did you make 3-figure or more per post from the first few posts? If not what motivated to start posting and why would this motivation be gone? Content creation is like everything else in life, there are ups and downs. If you quit now, you'll never know when could have been your next trip up. Beside, you have no idea why @smooth isn't upvoting you today. He may have his reasons. Maybe his bot crashed. Or maybe his voting power is too low so he is taking a break.
I'm not really upset about the situation, nor do I have anything negative to say about the votes from the whale. What sucks is I thought I was generating content that was valued by the community only to find out the reason that I made anything on these posts was due to the upvoting power of one individual. Not the combined value of the others voting.
If you still have many upvotes it means your posts are valued by the community. Also the best indicator of a quality post imo is the number of comments ( interest)
200$-300$ per post is hugely overvalued, when/if steem has millions of active users the highest you could expect is maybe 10$ per post but you would probably only get a few dollar on average. If you look at some popular profil like dollarvigilante or stelabelle they also had a decrease in reward, because the whales are doing the right thing which is to diversify payout, if they keep upvoting the same people you have 90% of people that are not coming back, that's exactly what is happening when you look at the stats.
If @smooth's vote had been your only vote, it wouldn't have netted you more than a few bucks. The reason that vote made so much difference is because it snowballed with the many other smaller but no less real upvotes from your other followers. If money isn't your main driver, you should give more weight to number of upvotes and quality and quantity of relevant comments over payout as payout is only indirectly correlated to actual popularity.