Yes, Steem certainly needs to attract investors or there is no market price (and consequently, no payouts).

The benefits of owning Steem has to be worth the cost of buying it, both now as early speculative investors and in the future as long term stakeholders.

The benefits of owning a stock are that, aside from increasing in value due to other investors (this is not long term sustainable on its own), they pay out dividends to the owner when the company finally becomes profitable.

Steem doesn't pay dividends, your stake only ever dilutes, even as an active user of Steem Power engaged in curation. So the other benefits have to outweigh the cost of that dilution. In the case of liquid Steem, the benefits are the ease of transacting (it works much better than Bitcoin, with no fees). But ultimately it will depend on the benefits of Steem Power (your ability to participate in directing the rewards distribution, as well as informal benefits of ownership such as status within the Steem ecosystem).

Does Steemit currently attract investors? Why or why not?

Clearly it does attract some, or there would be no market price. Of course there is a risk that Steem remains entirely speculative, like a stock such as Twitter, where they never turn into a genuinely profitable company (in the case of Steem it must be a genuinely valuable token to hold, in a non-speculative sense) and any increase in stock value is just funded by other speculative investors coming in.