I think shifting a bit more of the rewards to curators might help a bit as it may encourage people to amass and hold steem power instead of constantly cashing out their rewards. I realize some people do this for part of their living but that's not most of us.

I've put a good sized chuck of my own money here because I see long term potential but there are some things that need to change--some are cultural and some are technical.

I don't know how we go about changing the culture. There are so many different points of view here it's mind blowing. I saw a commenter mention maybe the culture and behaviors here should be regulated by some kind of AI because humans are imperfect and greedy. I'm not attacking anyone here but there are a lot of folks gaming the system. I'm not saying I'm perfect either by any means.

The culture side of it is very tricky. Changing the rewards system is not. We need more investors and curators--that is something that seems obvious to me. I don't know quite how we go about that but to keep trying to attract new users and to do that the quality of the average post here needs to increase. Again, I do not have a solution for this, it's only an observation.

Sorry I don't have better answers than that. You do pose a valid point though and there is cause for concern. Hopefully we will see brighter days in the future once we get past the upcoming B2X event. I'm thinking we'll see some money flow back into altcoins once that's passed. It doesn't address the other problems here but it is something to consider as another contributor to why we've seen this multi month bleed in the price of STEEM.