Good post. My personal stance is that the high SBD is the main reason. Many dormant users started posting again, and investors (such as myself) anticipated a rise in Steem. SMT and HF20, perhaps. It often difficult to say the causality between events and prices, some even suggest that price movement are quantum events. I think the market will become more selective in 2018 and focus more on performance as you mentioned. Steem doing pretty good (https://www.blocktivity.info), while BTC and Ethereum are overloaded.