Yea that would be nice wouldn't it. There are probably several factors at play for why steem is having so much trouble. The high inflation and lack of demand are the main culprits, but why the lack of demand compared to other projects? Steem doesn't have the best reputation due to the ninja-mine, the initial 100% inflation, whale issues, a platform that doesn't really do what some people think it was supposed to do, constant selling to keep the lights on by the lead development team in Steemit.Inc, a lack of marketing or advertising (though with retention rates so low that doesn't make much sense to spend money there), and there are probably some I am missing...

In my opinion we probably need to drop the reward pool all together, cut the inflation to the DAO as well as witnesses and make the inflation extremely small overall, like 1% per year. Let smts and games be the value drivers for steem.

That is one idea.

The second would be that if you keep a steem reward pool, I would try to actually back it with something, like ad revenue. That would at least give it some fundamental value as well as utility.

Not sure exactly the specifics of how that would be done, but the point is that things likely can't continue like they are for steem to exist long term. We need revenue coming in instead of just going out.