You know, I haven't looked at the trending page in probably 6 months, and I see no reason to do so any time soon. I'm not going to find anything interesting to read or listen to on there that I won't find in my feed. When I joined steemit last May, people would flock to the trending to try to vote early on the big posts to get a piece of the curation reward, I suspect that hasn't really changed all that much.
As for the price of steem, it's still twice as high as it was when I joined. I got no real complaints about that.