Majority of small exchanges with little or no listing fee, usually does not provide enough publicity, and would not be an ideal target of small projects. Some run voting contests, which are ways of improving their own publicity.
A top exchange is always the best destination.
the reason why they are small is because they dont provide enough publicity or promotions due to a tight budget .these kind of exchanges will slowly die in the long run because no one ever trades them and people will oftenly mistakin them as shady . your right mate , top exchange is the best way to go because you are already sure about their quality . although the main issue of top exchanges is that they cost a little more fee compare to the unrated ones but that isnt a big loss if you are really conscious about your safety .
Talking about top exchanges, most of them all started as little too, even the popular Binance started little, it’s just their strategy that supersedes most of these smaller ones and if these smaller ones know how to play their game well, they might not necessary park up.
It just same in business generally, we have large scale businesses and also small scale businesses both are doing fine in business industry, though some small ones may not see the light of the day and that won’t be long from when they started.
This is same in exchanges too; we have some exchanges that are relatively small and have been existing for some time now and still existing. In fact they have less stress compared to the major ones, the major ones keeps having on challenge one way or the other without disclosing it to the public.