Look, I’m being realistic; you might not like what I have to say, but Valve is a business and it’s their business to maintain a storefront that customers can use to find decent games. If customers can’t find decent games, their storefront, ergo their entire business has problems, and that also means problems for those who use their storefront for their business. They need to maintain consistent quality on their products and they are not out there to do ‘the little guy’ a favour, there are other platforms for that (see itch.io, humble, or desura) that you can publish your games to.
Steam needs a barrier to entry in order to maintain a reasonable quality level across the board. Once upon a time only big publishers were able to get their games up there, later down the line they had a team curating submissions. That team became overwhelmed and it’s no longer reasonable to even attempt to curate the storefront (literally thousands of submissions per day), so they adopted Greenlight. Greenlight didn’t work because the barrier to entry was simply too low and the market was absolutely flooded with rubbish, making it impossible to sift out games and meaning that decent indie titles often failed to get any visibility at all.
I’ll say it again for the third time - if your business and game is worth selling on Steam you can find $10,000 with relative ease, and I’ve already mentioned four different routes you can take to get that fee. If you cannot find it and other people do not have faith in your product, perhaps it’s time to admit that your game may well not meet the quality bar required for Steam.