I agree Steemit has a retention problem, but I'm not sure STEEM does. It's an amazing cryptocurrency. I'm all about changed lives, but I also want to ensure people actually understand where the value comes from. It comes from investors increasing the value of STEEM which increases the rewards pool and the $ number people see on their posts which gets them excited about Steemit. You mention currators, but they are actually losing out with a high SBD price. People use bots for self-voting instead of curate because there's a better ROI there.
The Keynesian fallacy warnings are important. I'm certainly not wanting to artificially control anything. What I am trying to do is avoid boom and bust cycles which I think a broken peg allows for. If the SBD peg worked in both directions, that manipulation wouldn't be possible and the market cap of STEEM is large enough to not be easily manipulated compared to SBD (though it still needs to grow much larger).
Speculators would still be giving us a gift, we'd just be able to collect on it quickly as we convert STEEM to SBD to get more if it. Since the SBD could go right back to STEEM again, it wouldn't be creating new money out of nothing. That's the theory, anyway.
As to your conclusion, I do think it has validity. What I also see is people start to expect SBD to be worth something high. They hold it as it goes back to $1 instead of obtaining STEEM which (IMO) has a much, much higher upside. I want to get more people thinking long-term, not short-term. That's where the real value is. If they can't speculate on that future value, they they shouldn't speculate on a broken pegged coin either. It would serve them best to hold a stable coin.
Great comments, @ashe-oro. Thanks!