You summarized well what the existing investors and users should think about.
They already invested their time and money, and they can not get the refund, so the only thing they can do is trying to fix the problems whatever they are.

However for new investors, there is almost no motivation to invest with all these problems and risks. The only incentive for betting is a slim chance that all these issues will be "solved" eventually in the future. To estimate this chance, then they look at the people who can fix these problem, which are the dev team and whales.

The dev team and whales are really seriously invested in this project? To new investors' point of view, they are already big beneficiaries of this project even when it fails. I think someone should calculate how much those dev teams, witness nodes, and early miners have already cashed out so far versus how much actual money they invested. Their ROI must already be way over than any other projects they invested recently. That is why they keep powering down and selling at lower prices. Actually their shares are not much decreasing either even with weekly powering down because they continue to get new steems from "witnessing", "curating", mining, and sometimes "blogging" with their own huge votes. When they already made huge profits, the remaining game is a just extra bonus round regardless of future steem prices.

So why not resetting the system and restarting it?
Why not starting a new project with better features, fairer rules and share distribution, balanced power structure, true decentralized reputation system with actual human curating and engagement without bots which can not read contents?
They know these are not easy thing to achieve, but which one has better chance?

If new potential investors think this way, there is little chance the steem network can survive and grow.
Again steem is not democracy or anything similar, so it is up to them who have power that can make changes.