For the first question I think it's a matter of too much Steem being produced daily.

The system is adding more than 1 million Steem tokens every day. 90% of which is in the form of Steempower. So it's not all liquid but anybody following the markets can see that there are 201 million Steem in existence. Whether or not they're all liquid might not be apparent or matter to the average trader.

The great news is that the issuance of new Steem isn't written in stone. See this post by @fyrstikken for one example of proposed changes to the system.

The TLDR version you can tell other people is: Steem isn't growing in popularity at a pace matching the issuance of new tokens. That hurts the price despite the innovative technology it represents. There's promise in recovering the price with a vastly expanded user base or a reduction of Steem inflation.

Also worthy of note is that rewarding authors and curators is a novel idea which won't ever go away even if the champion of the idea isn't Steem in the future. Steem could be the MySpace to some upcoming platform that "drinks it's milkshake!"

Edit: Proofing my writing I think that comment comes off like I'm not hopeful about Steem's future. The technology is very ahead of the competition. I'm bullish but anything can happen.

The second question

Yes it could hurt your brand through false correlation. You may be right to explain in a post that the correlation is the post value to the Steem value. If you want to measure your popularity number of upvotes per post is more relevant.

Would be a great asset if you or anybody wrote a piece explaining that nuance for the folks out there.

Peace.