Steemmonsters is definitly going to be huge, the userbase is growing day by day and we it's still being developed with more features and cool stuff! I haven't leased out my deck because of low summoner levels, I'm trying to lvl them up a bit more so I can do the same thing you did, lease them out and split the DEC 50/50, or 60/40, still not sure.

STEEM is definitly not dead, I keep up with a lot of projects since STEEM isn't my only ivnestment, a lot of them are dead, really dead , from what I can see STEEM is def not a dead project, there are new users, new content creators, a lot of development, witnesses know a lot about blockchain, and this is obvious since they were able to push out 2 HF in a row, which is something that most blockchains can't do. Hopefully with the flag system we will get a better reward system very close to being perfect and we can focus on dapps, games, use-cases, cashflow and tribes.

About the new 50/50 reward system, just like you I'm starting to feel less pressure about posting and more pressure to curate, this is a good thing, it means that whenever I do post I can focus on quality over quantity, increasing the quality of content on STEEM will surely bring in more viewers and users to the blockchain.