What you see when the price goes down is the people who are only here for the money taking a break. These are the people who post when the prices are up and then sell straight away. I don't blame them as they are only interested in the profit but if you are following the larger accounts and the most active individuals you will see that they actually step up there effort as the platform gets a bit quieter. The reason being that the same amount of STEEM is being distributed every day but at the moment there is less competition for the reward pool so everybody who is active will actually be getting a larger share than if the blockchain was busier and more people were utalizing there votes.

As you said, you are actually early to the party. Lots of people have yet to hear about or get involved with crypto and for me steem is one of the most interesting platforms for development.

I mean sure, we have new platforms like busy.org, steemplus and the main one I've been using lately steempeak. But they all operate on the steem block chain. So the price of steem would remain relatively in tact, if they were just using their front ends.
However for new comers, won't this become a point of confusion? With so many new platforms which do they sign up for... For us it won't matter, it will still drive the price of steem up. But with so many new choices beginning to roll in, will "We Steemians" be better off spreading the word of many, or uniting together to promote one individual platform on the steem blockchain.

Part of what makes it interesting is the amount of apps that are being built onto the blockchain. While they can all do different things and have different purposes for this point they will all be linked to the same rewards system and login. If you sign up to any of the new apps going forwards you will be signing up to the steem blockchain itself. (coming soon). So every app that is bringing people to the blockchain and increasing posting will be adding more value to STEEM itself. This site has a lot of flaws and in a while will most likely not be how people interact with the blockchain, instead using a more people friendly version like Partiko or steempeak.