I would also like to ask you: Were you expecting too much?
It occurs to me that you were either way too fast or expecting way too high on something. The examples you gave on the "only a handful who were decent at mapping" is already ridiculous. You don't have to have several ranked maps/GD or extremely known to be considered decent at mapping.
And I have barely seen in your posting history of you posting in any modding queues outside of like, 1? I can't speak for anyone, but I personally used to spam consistently at least 7-8 modding queues per 2-3 day, some I have to take M4M request in order to get any hope of someone modding one of my early maps. And no, I used to have one map that exceed 10* way back, and I still be able to find mods, albeit a little low quality since barely anyone truly have enough expertise to that. If you can't find enough, find more. Page 2 exists.
Collaboration isn't something you'd expect anyone to offer to you, especially you're still a month in, with only 4 maps on the back of your hand. That's way too low of an indicator of your experience for anyone to think of doing a collab.
Also mapping is a very long journey. Even if you're only aiming for more generic style, it would take at least around a year to finally get a hang of it, much less more niche one that requires much more mapping experience, tech for example, which can take up to several years. Mine personally have to experience 6 years to finally realize a consistent style.