Life isn't fair [duplicate]

Rare and specialized answers can only be understood by rare and specialized users. There are obviously fewer of these as compared to trivial answers which are easy and more common.

So we cannot force, ask, or request normal users to vote for a complex answer.

Often these rare and specialized posts have bounties applied which is a good and official way to reward the author very quickly.

Stackoverflow is about contribution, I personally prefer helping and solving someone's issue than getting more reputation. Few upvotes on these specialized answers are more worthy than lots of votes over trivial ones as to make someone understand complex logic is not an easier task. It gives more satisfaction and long term benefits too.

To post, or not to post, that is the question:
Whether 'tis Nobler for the user to endure
The Views and Votes of outrageous reputation,
Or to take Arms against a Backlog of bugs,
And by answering end them: to log out, to AFK
No more; and by being AFK, to say we end
The Heart-ache, and the regexed HTML
That Tony the Pony inherited? 'Tis a badge
of gold to be desired. To log out, to AFK;
To AFK: perhaps to eat Waffles: Aye, there's the rub,
For in that AFK of activity what Unicorns may come,
When we have logged out of this stack overflow,
Must give us pause. There's the reputation
That makes strife of SO answering:
For who would bear the low votes and low views over time,
The random downvote, the pedant's comment,
The disapproval of hard work, the OP's delay,
The senselessness of the Fastest Gun, and the doubt
That knowledge receives in the face of learning,
When he himself might his answers make
With a fastest gun? Who would provide research,
To mock and test under a jittery compiler,
But that the fear of throwing an exception after publishing,
The uncaught exception, from whose cause
No control returns, complicates the answer
And makes us rather be the fastest gun,
Than post answers to questions we may not know.
Thus the dilemma does make Unicorns of us all,
And thus the Zalgo nature of answering
Is pushed out 6 to 8 weeks with the Arial font of consideration,
And experts of high reputation and knowledge,
With this consideration become lost in the why,
And are murdered by meta.

MSO/SO Adaptation of Shakespeare

Your short answer may get more upvotes, but probably just from the passing crowd thinking "True, that!" upvoting and moving on, doing nothing of much note with what they learned by your post.

Your more detailed answer will actually help someone. If it's a correct post, actually meets the requirement outlined in the question then the poster (and future visitors who have that problem too and find that question/answer) will use that information to achieve something. You're actually helping these people, and that makes a difference.

Sure, some internet points here and there from people who agree with what you say are nice and everything, but actually helping someone and therefore making a difference to their lives (albeit however briefly) is a much better feeling.

On Drupal Answers, my 2 of 3 most upvoted answers are things that took significant amount of research and explaining, and one is something that wasn't quite documented and I was able to respond just thanks to the fact someone pointed me to it in the past. So, not really trivial ones. They wasn't upvoted instantly, true, but over the time they gave me fair share of my reputation.

If you want to impress, answer complicated questions and wait. If you want to grind rep, answer questions usable for larger groups. That's all to it ;)

Personally, I find it extremely rewarding if I am able to answer a difficult question, even if it does not get many upvotes, rather than a question which gets the same answer 10+ times.

It shows me that I have very specialized skills (which often requre a deep understanding of the topic) in a certain area, and nobody else was able to answer.

What is better than that?

Specialized answers are specialized. The upvote button tooltip says

This question shows research effort; it is useful and clear.

Most people won't be able to accurately judge whether a specialized answer shows research effort. (It might look like it does, but how can they tell it's not just a clever ruse?). Specialized information is, almost by definition, useful to fewer people because it's specialized. Clarity is similar; it's clear if you have some understanding in the field, but impenetrable if you don't.

To some extent this is by design. However, after those initial observations, Martijn Pieters's answer gets more and more weight. Over time, more and more people will see the question, and there won't be as much competition, and there won't be as many trivial duplicates. Non-specialized information is easy to generate and easy to find; so much so that it gets duplicated and diluted left and right. Specialized information, on the other hand, gets trimmed down, consolidated, and condensed.

You'll find lots of answers about silly little boolean operator mistakes, and they'll always be popping up, but for more specialized topics, time eventually starts to produce canonical answers. They're so good that no one needs to ask similar questions anymore, and you'll get all the sweet, sweet, rewards! (Well, if you wrote the canonical answer. But that's what I'm aiming to do too.)

When asking highly specialized question I always try to offset that by giving it a few hundred reputation points of bounty. This serves for both potential persons who'd answer the question, getting decent reputation points even without many upvotes, and for me as the question gets a lot more visibility (being specialized it doesn't get lot of upvotes nor views).

The only annoying thing is that I cannot set up a bounty right away after posting the question, even though I'm quite sure that a particular question will not be very popular.