I try to always be higher than the height of difficulty...but that's been kind of difficult in this cult
Does that mean that if I don't use enough mining power I could end up spinning my wheels and not get any coins at all?
I was assuming that your return is generally proportional to the amount of resources you can allocate to mining, or is that not the case?
Correct. You will probably waste more power than you will get back mining on anything than ASICs and a GPU farm. We have a unique situation here where we do not see any value of the coins yet so you are investing essentially in mining power in anticipation for a return but if you are mining very small JBS on your own hardware, you are really wasting power and not seeing any benefit on the cost -> JBS ratio.
I would suggest you rent a rig if you want to build some mining power up and use that to mine JBS. Once you get some, you then can just stake and earn coins for holding the ones you mine.