Not everyone is concerned with making money. Sure I would love to be able to not work and do nothing but steemit but I have a good income from my hosting. The servers, my witness and seed server are on are actually surplus company servers, since I own the company reprovisoning them for STEEM Servers was easy. I asked myself if I could use them and myself said sure, why not. So I am not out the investment capital cost of the equipment rackspace bandwidth or the power cost. All those fees outside of the original equipment cost are part of my COLO agreement with Tulix.com my data center provider in Atlanta. Those fees are unchanging, a fixed cost.
But I know as investment in STEEM, the value of STEEM it self will be damaged ireparabley when Facebook launches a crypto similar to steem. Now unlike most Blogging STEEMians I am a programmer that can write my own SMT's for other website platforms like forums and news based websites that have reply boards.
So steemit could disapear and I would still do okay with SMT's. But you better be sure Zuckerberg is looking at SMT's too. He will also run something similar to STEEM SMT's on his blockchain. This will pretty much bury STEEM and SMT's regardless of the survival of STEEMit.com. At that point STEEM ceases to be a worthwile investment for anyone. The party is over.
Even for @Ned and @Stan.
But @Ned and @Stan and the whales may see the door closing and jump ship before Facebook launches. Just imagine the flood of STEEM on the exchanges when that happens. You will be lucky to get 10 satoshi for a steem.
I think everything that you wrote is very possible to happen and probably will happen, so those factors combined with how crypto is inflated in price in general for several other factors give steem a very bad prognosis in the mid-term.