I honestly think this should be a wake up call for the whole steemit community and while it's a hefty blow to morale, it can be an opportunity to open the market up to new people and new developments. Certainly 1-2 USD per Steem is a good price to be thinking about joining the community, higher than that gets a bit dubious when you consider what the platform currently offers.

What I think should be number 1 priority this year for the platform is to develop a solid business case for buying Steem. There NEEDS to be an actual reason for someone to want to buy Steem, or hold on to Steem, or exchange Steem for other things, outside of Steemit shenanigans alone. Because the payouts don't mean anything if no one is actually buying more Steem from outside, do you realise that? If people as a whole raise their arms and think ok I'm out of the Steem biz bro, then how exactly are you "making money" with your blog posts? You'd be accumulating some number in a currency that has no use.

Unfortunately I'm not a developer, but a "pay with Steem" payment portal addition for external websites would be absolutely helpful. I myself design and sell clothes and other art stuff and would be more than happy to sell stuff on this platform, but truth be told I'm not amazed by what's out there. Does Peerhub still work? I had a look and everything on there is from 2 years ago. Is there some other marketplace?

Stuff like that would help the use case for Steem, as would other ideas that I don't have at the moment. I mean even Bitcoin has actual use now because people can pay for stuff with it, not just buy and sell it at exchanges. The exchange crypto trading game is by far the most damaging aspect of it all, that alone will never sustain any cryptocurrency.

As much as I have my problems with the platform, for real at least it's doing something that actually works for once. I've seen the cryptocurrencies come and go since about 2012 and for real 99% of them are unnecessary utter garbage. Completely irrelevant. Try if you can to find coinmarketcap with waybackmachine or something from 2013, 14, 15, 16 etc. I GUARANTEE you won't recognise like 90% of the coins even in the top 10 let alone more. That's because they died, because they never did anything in the first place. Steem does something, we are here writing on the platform running on its backbone. That is special, and it needs some hefty business thinking to make it actually work and prosper as an enterprise.