Tournaments what am I doing wrong (or right)

[MadeHand]

I've been playing a fair number of MTTs having been playing NL hold em cash games before. I haven't reached a final table yet but have cashed (these usually have about 600 entrants or so.)

I'm just wondering if there's anything I'm doing wrong and if you have any advice to give.

After the first hour the blinds have gone up to the extent that a starting stack is now in trouble. So then actually playing poker becomes impossible- no post flop play unless you're a big stack, which hasn't happened unless you've got cards and paid off in the first hour.

Then it becomes a question of finding big cards and going all in or standard raises to steal the blinds. Stealing with rubbish doesn't seem to work because of the prevalence of other short stacks who will go all in themselves when they see chips on the table. To be effective, with a 3xBB raise it would need to work more than 2 times out of 3 which it doesn't really, therefore, there seems little value in doing it other than to not appear too tight.

So this inevitably leads to alot of bustouts with a cash occurring on the rare occasions you actually get cards. Other players seem to play the same way with a few loose guys who make dumb all ins and calls.

There just seems to be so much less skill in these shallow stacked tournaments compared to cash games.