Well, we have a lot more activity, and some of those new accounts are bound to stick in the long run. It's also our job (as a community) to ignore spammy content and flag anything that's copy paste into oblivion so the spammers quickly see there's no profit in their type of activity.
As for pricing, there were lots of people who said BTC was "overpriced" when it rose from 80-something cents to $20. And where's BTC today? The cool think about Steem/Steemit is that there's an actual "economic reason" (the social platform + apps) for the currency to exist... more than most alt coins can claim.