Steem is still very small. It's being ironed out. It needs more work.
As for the price, any currency people are getting paid with fluctuate in value.
People invest so much time on Facebook, and elsewhere not making any money. It's true that the activity on Steem has a bit slowed down, but I think the primary issues aren't monetary, simply because most website don't pay their users yet some have many times more visitors than Steem.
It's a question of time and some needed work on the UI and official mobile app and a couple of other stuff that are being worked on in my opinion.
The UI is in definite need of some user preferences. One of them being a language preference so you only see posts matching the same language. I think that would help clear up some of the clutter in the topics. That type of stuff wouldn't need to be on the block chain either.