The way to increase demand for buying is simple: reduce price.
This is not true, when people see a price go from $4 back to $0.1 they ask themselves what is wrong with the platform. And it is easily verifiable by looking at the daily volume of steem which kept going down regardless.
The way to increase demand and confidence is an increased price of steem which means an increase of the capacity of the platform to handle more users.
Steem power is not what gives you influence in the system. What gives you influence is the % of the total steem supply that you have, so steem is your influence and steem power is steem.
Powering your steem is just a necessary process to participate and curate, but it doesn't give you any financial benefit and never did.
the decision of whether to Power Up
Why should you care if people power up or not? Do you care if people are selling their bitcoin?
Many here have this idea that you need to lock people for 2 years to keep them involved in the platform long term, this is a misconception. If you want people to stick around,participate and invest long term all you have to do is make their investment slowly grow overtime and create a viable model. ( The current hyperinflated model is not sustainable as it creates a constant downward pressure on the steem price which means a pressure on the rewards of this platform)