When it comes to price drops of Steem, I think a big part of the issue is that, by design, Steem guarantees that a percentage of the money used to buy Steem will just 'disappear' into the pockets of witnesses and Steem posters (whales).. So as a 'classic' cryptocurrency that can be relied on to grow in value just due to it being attractive to investors, it is not so great.

You touch on a very complex point in my opinion, there can be a whole post dedicated to this, which is why I would like to talk more to you about this in a DM.

In the end I think it all comes down to whether we are able to create more value inflows with our content, communities and dapps than value outflows. If we don't sell all our steem that we receive from the network we will go a long way. And I think to achieve this we need a mixture of a good code and culture.