The problem is there has been a period of abundance over the last years, especially with bot voting, the community landed up taking advantage of the abundance and engaged in practices like self-voting and extracting as much rewards as possible and leaving being not much value.

Steem because known for a place where bidbots are rampant and the sell pressure of everyone earning rewards and selling is not a sustainable model for investors so the price declined.

Those are the main highlights, I do agree with you in principle that distribution is important but we also need better retention strategies and onboarding funnels, no good handing out coin for people to just dump if they find Steem too complicated or uninteresting.