I think this is the right answer. I know we all hate being here, and you want to do something active to change the current situation, but I don't think the answer is a drastic overhaul of the system. I think the unfortunate reality is that the entire crypto market is depressed right now and no matter what we do it won't have a HUGE impact on the price, but this is only temporary.

The prices will eventually go back up and when that happens we should be prepared. There are glaring things still wrong with the user experience throughout Steem. Account creation is still too hard even though it's getting easier, Steem Ninja being integrated into the front page of Steemit would be a great step forward. Professionally done video tutorials explaining the system, and easily accessible from multiple frontends especially Steemit since it's the most used. And obviously the hugest value adds would be communities and SMT's.

We just need to use this time to create value and position ourselves to be able to go viral the next time things turn around.

Not to say I'm saying we do nothing to make Steem more investor friendly, one thing I think would be a good idea that's not in that grey area you were speaking of would be more in depth curation and autovoting tools. Steemauto + Steemworld are nice, but what if we had something that provided analytics on averages of what people make per post, so that you could at a glance see how much you could potentially earn for supporting one author or another. Taking that a step further, if this app is already tracking people's earnings, you could also have presets like "Highest earners overall, arts, Steem, Music, etc" So if you want to automatically curate one of those areas the app can just do the work for you in figuring out who to vote for. I know that's super complicated, but since we're just spitballing here...