You are right about the general decline in perceived value of cryptos, those that witnessed the effects of the pump and dumps definitely scared off many people. It is funny if you think about it; what is the point of collecting as much steem as possible expecting a profit later, if nobody is buying???
While I agree with the two areas that are lacking; that good / popular content floats to where it is most visible and attracting new users are critical and closer to failure... (You can get stuff you like to the top of your own list, but you gotta find it)
I find that the way the stakeholders have over-powered the abilities of bots. Seriously, what could have been a massive windfall for the platform was delegated to private users who were willing to setup vote bots, resteem bots, etc etc... Where, it would have been far more productive to have "sponsored" posts, where a person could send to the platform say 1SBD for the content to appear on the feed of X people... that would create an internal market that would force the value of steem up because it's being used for more than just selling for dollars.
It's too bad, because I really enjoy steemit as a platform...