RE: When in doubt, zoom out!
The idea in the beginning was that users could use their stake (their investment) to vote on what they liked. If you liked dissertations on dust you could upvote that, if you liked memes you could upvote those too. If you just liked an author because he was a cool dude or your friend you could upvote his stuff too if you wanted to. It was all in the eye of the stake holder (investor). There was no universal set rules on what defines "quality content" for each and every stake holder (again investor) to abide by, which is more or less my point... well that and pointing out that there was more to receiving upvotes than just "quality" of the content, IE networking, engaging, posting about content a majority of users were interested in etc etc etc which brings me back to my kim k banana point..,
The idea of the biggest investors at the beginning was to attract authors which produced quality content to attract more users and investors who saw this quality content.
With shit-copy&paste-minimalism-content like nowadays you can attract neither more users nor investors, and the STEEM price obviously behaves accordingly. And don't say "bear market" now: STEEM lost more than other cryptocurrencies which can easily be seen when checking the coinmarketcap-ranking.
Of course also networking, engaging etc. plays a role, but if good content as essential ingredient of a reward based social media platform is missing then all other things won't help.
STEEM of nowadays neither offers (enough) good content nor engagement.
I know about the motto that investors should be able to do with their stake whatever they please, but responsible investors would know that they should support quality content creation and attract new users in their own interest. And at the beginning of STEEM (when I was already there!) there were far more responsible investors and stakeholders than nowadays. Now everybody squeezes as much money out as they can as long as the STEEM price isn't zero. Considering the HUGE potential STEEM once had that is a very short seighted approach in my opinion.
Of course: stake holders are free to do whatever they like, but I and many, many other potential stakeholders (who don't even make the effort to hint at the STEEM problems anymore because they don't care) are also free not to invest in STEEM because of how things are developing there.