I haven't seen an impact-of-getting-to-the-top-of-HN post in a very long time. Anecdotally, the traffic for a post getting to the top of HN is not what it used to be.
You're right that it isn't a marketing strategy. It's too much of a lottery. Worse, when projects or startups try to get attention that way, they make themselves less interesting.
Have you thought about creating a formal program to preflight more in-depth content? It's hard to justify spending 100 hours writing a blog post when the chances of having more than zero people see it depend on whether or not Elon Musk smoked weed that day or whatever. I realize it's partly just impossible to predict what people will be interested in, but that could be a way to encourage people to create more interesting stuff.
How would you go about it?
It could also be interesting to try something like Edge.org, where different people create content around a given question or theme.
If your stuff is any good, of course.
It's a device for distilling novelty in the world into /bestcomments.
By that I mean, this community will signup, tinker, praise, buy and complain, at a much greater rate than any other form of web traffic.