None of what you said is accurate, and your analogy is terrible, sorry, not trying to be mean, but its all flawed.
Steem's value proposition is adverting, same as Minds.com. Steem is doing a much shittier job than Minds, and that's why Minds has millions of real users and high level talent like Joe Rogan even though the Minds token itself is holding very little value currently.
You should listen to Ivan On Tech explain why he does not care about the decentralized social media platforms. He points out that they are solving the wrong problem, because while censorship-resistance is valuable, that without discovery tools is useless.
Steem's first and foremost customer should be content producers. What do content producers want? Superior "discovery" features to give their content an edge. I remember after HF 22 an Ethereum developer came to Steem for the first time and decided to launch his blog by paying bidbots for awareness. He was promptly attacked, on his first post, by the angry content nazis around here that proceeded to fill his comment area with authoritarian commands of how he must behave in their community.
Fuck those fools, they know nothing and will kill the chain. A real user, with real money willing to spend in our ecosystem was attacked. I can't believe the fucking idiocy of these people. They are hurting their own bags and are too stupid to not get it because they probably never ran a business of their own in their whole life.
Okay, so let's break this down so that you can follow my point. Steem needs initial investors, people buying STEEM because they believe the price will go up. They are passive investor types, they will NOT want to spend time here curating and will delegate to a business that agrees to send them a regular cut of the curation reward.
Bid bots served these people, now a few actual curating services exist to service these people but its no where near as profitable and attractive to investors, which means you will get less investors after HF22. That is proven, we have less investors and STEEM is worth a lot less.
The Bidbots served two parties, the first being passive investors and the second being content producers willing to pay to get an edge. It is not true that bid bots were always profitable to authors, actually if you wanted a large upvote you often went into the negative, but getting a reward reduced the overall cost of promotion.
This was a functional "DeFi" economy existing on Steem and I argue it was what made Steem special and better than all the other blockchains, short of Ethereum. HF22 fucked Steem's DeFi in more than one way actually, for example, the "Threshold" thing prevented content producers from effectively rewarding their audience in the comment area with upvotes. Content producers value those kinds of features, as they often give out t-shirts or $100 in BTC/BCH in order to keep the crowds coming. But hey, let's just fuck ourselves over again.
ALL THIS SAID...
I still prefer a STEEM burning model for promotion. But really, we should have both. SP leasing, Bidbots, audience rewards in upvotes, attracted all three parties we cared about: Authors, Investors, Audience. But then we did HF22 and boned ourselves hard.
What we needed for success was not HF22, it was referral programs and Brave Rewards style programs. Look at Energi, with its 37k subs on Youtue, now compare that to Steemit's consistently shit following.
Key takeaway:
If you want an audience give them small amounts of free STEEM regularly, but instead HF22 reduced the value of small upvotes and kicked it to the already powered up dolphins and whales.
If you want investors give them convenient and attractive passive ROI opportunities like bidbot services. Instead HF22 destroyed that service and caused less stability in curation earnings overall by giving idiots free downvotes.
If you want content producers provided them with tools that help them reach a wider audience or features that allow them to retain their audience with prizes. HF22 provided no new tools or features here, but took both the bidbot services and comment upvotes away.
HF22 or #NewSteem was the dumbest shit I might have ever heard of a business doing. Well, a facial shaving company alienating men is pretty damn stupid, so let's just say HF22 was the second dumbest thing...
Without getting into all your points, I don't disagree entirely, but the issue is having a single level. We need a double level.
Steemit was a blogging platform.
Steem or Hive as the new one is called will quickly move to a 2 level system.
The tokens bought and earned will be used for various things then converted to steem.
Blogging (rewarding content) cannot exist with content promotion or game rewards, but they can all be on the same network.
I dont think bidbots are wrong, but they shouldn't be competing with a reward pool. It completely messed things up and no one was curating. I'm not saying it was wrong, but a lot of junk was being promoted that no one would realistically pay to promote if they weren't gauranteed an ROI. That is the system I meant when I said it is unsustainable. Paid promotion is cool.
The value of the SMT (HMT now?) will be up to the community. If they mess with the economics theybwont hurt all of steem. Personally I think they should make more use of SBD too.
I see several different super SMTs emerging for various aspects of blogging (high quality, emphasis on social, art, research etc) with a whole lot of junk ones and an unknown amount of dapp ones.