If I understand well @geoff777 your topic is centered around your acknowledgment/recognition from other users and/or staff? The topic was split so you may not have decided specifically what it was about.
But I think I do understand how you feel.
Because when I started working a long time ago (and for a long time) I was just a contractor for someone who managed the projects. He was almost the only one that was talking to his clients, I just wrote code following guidelines, basically.
I had feedback only when the work wasn’t as good as expected or if there were issues.
If the work was good enough and the client was satisfied, I didn’t have any feedback at all.
After a while, it made me sad not to have my good work recognized and I talked the person I worked for (that I knew very well) that I’d like a bit more consideration and have not only bad feedback, but also positive feedback if my work was done right. That would motivate me more.
He went this way for a while, but the situation ended by staying the same as before. I learned to accept that the silence - no feedback - meant my work was good.
But your issue is different here because I agree that nowadays, a single click on the like button is indeed positive feedback, an acknowledgment, a recognition, a share of belief, etc.
So, maybe the fundamental question here is: why are your posts not acknowledged as you expect them to be?
Personally, instead of discussing a personal issue, I’d be more interested in a discussion as the title says: “how to make contributing to meta more enjoyable?”, but in a general way.
And except for the little things I posted, I can’t say much more, I don’t have any real issue with meta.
I suppose that when a person makes suggestions about features and UX, they often think their ideas are at the least very convenient, and at the most super awesome. Like “how the hell did nobody think about that before?” We are biased, we all want to think we are intelligent, know better what other needs, that things we think about aren’t that difficult to implement and that everyone applauds at the end… And I’m very guilty (and aware!) of that.
At first, I enjoyed seeing a few likes and Osioke’s very positive reply here, for example. But I was disappointed by the lack of traction at the end (the topic seemed to “fade away into history”, to use your words), when I was sure my idea was top-notch and inventive in the context of a forum because I faced this image searching issue so many times in the past.
But in the real world, that doesn’t work necessarily this way. Maybe looking for specific images in a forum is too much of a niche use of the search. Maybe it’s incredibly difficult to implement. Maybe there are tons of more important things to do with Discourse. Maybe [insert dozen of reasons to lack of traction].
I also checked Discourse’s direct concurrents (Flarum, nodeBB) to see if they had a similar features (they don’t), and looked at Discoure’s repo to see how the results’ excerpts were done to try to grasp a bit how it worked (I understood almost nothing, obviously… 
).
In this sense, I didn’t enjoy the lack of feedback on a contribution I thought was awesome.
But on this particular topic, that was my own personal issue, not a general issue.