You touch on a lot of good points here. Almost 450k accounts have been created, but ~11% of accounts opened in 2016, including bots, and multiples, remain active. Almost 90% of users bail in the first year.

Oligarchical hoarding of the rewards pool, naturally undertaken by folks desirous of tending to their quality of life, proves insurmountable for the majority of people newly arrived, who aren't willing or able to cut deals for votes from whales, and refuse to be relegated to ghettos of neglected, viewless blogs.

My best guess presently is that there are between 25k and 30k unique users, with a few tens of thousands of alts and bots, still active on Steemit today.

Pandering is the route to success for most that stay, and it is easy to see blogs flogging their virtue to whales, particularly in the last weeks, as @berniesander's botnet has undertaken mass flaggings of selected blogs with no little fanfare.

You can practically smell the drool of the panderers, obsequiously sucking up for their 1% pats on the head from their chosen master.

As you might guess, this is not my strategy ;)

Thanks!