but I still have absolutely no sense for how many Comments I could post

There’s an estimate provided at steemd.com. The RC cost of a comment increases with the amount of text. There’s no cost mentioned for blog posts. Are blog authors charged RC?

and the active, aggressive avoidance of discussing any RC costs for Posting, which should follow the same line of reasoning

Does this mean the RC costs for blog posting is unspecified or that it remains 0?

If your numbers are right, and I'm holding about 600 SP, that means that I could write 30 comments a day before I ran out of RC just through the process of commenting.

Multiply my estimate by 4 for single peak day of usage followed by 3 days of inactivity, since that is the number of days I was estimating for RC to 100% recharge from 0%.

because a cynical game designer would point out that you should charge people with more SP a higher RC value because those people are more likely to have posts and comments which drive more aggressive traffic and thus rack up more network and storage costs in the long run. I mean, if we are calculating future costs based on activity, then it would seem that those which are most likely to cause activity bear the brunt of that cost, right?

Powered up STEEM (SP aka Vests) and resource demands on the blockchain may not be well correlated, because they may be using bots to upvote their own sockpuppet posts without actually requesting the data for the blog posts for reading for each upvote. Also it’s not clear that the vested interests of whales are even aligned with maximizing the actual social media use of Steem and thus the growth of its non-bot usership.

Steem is designed analogous to socialism wherein we collectivize all the costs and then pay our share which is not fair because it isn’t correlated for each user to the actual derivative demand footprint they generate. But herein lies the egregious design flaw of Steem, because there’s no model for paying for the data storage and serving layer. Witness payments are for updating and maintaining a canonical copy of the blockchain.

One possible correct way to do this is that readers would pay on each instance they access some data. This also encourages readers to use caching so they don’t unnecessarily retrieve data more than once. But then this requires that freemium readers have some way to access the site without paying. One solution to that problem is advertising for freemium users and remove the advertising for non-freemium users. Steem apparently wasn’t designed to economically separate the data layer from the ledger layer, which seems to be a critical design flaw. I pointed this out more than a year ago.

Though I think you might be missing something by not noting that posters do have the ability to monetize their content – and, in fact, that's pretty much the sole and solid underpinning of the steem blockchain […] The monetization architecture is the only thing that's people seem to talk about.

The monetization w.r.t. to resource costs is not correlated to incentives as I have alluded to above. For example, freeium readers may be great for virally expanding readership and followers, but these minnow voters are negligible monetization.

Also since the change last year to linear voting, everyone has a monetary incentive to only vote for themselves. I explained in 2016 at the inception, that voting from collectivized pool of debasement has no possible viable game theory. The math and game theory of my 2016 blog is irrefutable: Steem is insolubly broken in terms of its fundamental design characteristics. AFAICT, the only thing holding it up is the speculative demand for cryptocurrency and the gamesmanship (combined with ignorance of n00bs and greater fools) of the broken economics and game theory.

Also blogging isn’t about direct monetization.

Additionally, I'm not down with the assessment that "micro-payments don't work", because we have some pretty good examples of micro-payment systems that do work

They don’t scale when there’s a cognitive load burden, because people have an opportunity cost on their time and complexity of system. Do you know of any counter example?

Micropayments may work when the cost is insignificant so the users don’t think about it.

Which is why I never expect it to happen.

It will never happen but for reasons you do not seem to understand. My 2016 blog explained the math and game theory: the voting system must be unfair. If you try to make it fair, then all you do is incentivize everyone to vote only for themselves and thus it is meaningless. Whereas as unfair, then it simply means the whales are raping the greater fools and hopefully there’s enough new greater fools buying STEEM and powering up to fund the whales’ appetite. Steem is a grand obfuscation.

I don't expect that steem is likely to go away soon simply because it does have an active (if ridiculously messy and largely content-corrupt) social network attached to it.

I thought that too, but if the tinker-tots are allowed to continue tinkering, they might just topple it sooner than I expected.

You need the whole thing any time you want to add a new node

Ah no. No disrespect intended. My four-part blog series on ledgers may be instructive.

I write very important blogs but I earn nearly nothing from them lately. But I don’t write them to monetize them directly. There is nothing that ties me strongly to posting them on Steem other than continuity. And soon I won’t be posting them here. I need so many features and capabilities that Steem will never get around to offering. And I need that my followers won’t be burdened by all this tinkering disruption.