BTC skyrocketing close to $3,500 + Steem users growing but yet Steem's falling hard?

It seems like Poloniex yet again put up that lovely "under maintenance" sign after just putting it down for a few days. It was up for weeks the previous time, and this has happened on multiple occassions. Bittrex was under maintenace too but yet they only need like 1/5th of the time Poloniex needs? (Okay, Polo is a joke but still.. what the hell is going on?)

Steem API is unclear to many devs and I had a developer pretty much give up on a project after some unknown update rendered the programs he was working on unusable. The updates are nice and I'm sure hardfork 20 will make the price rise a considerable bit, also whatever worries we have about Steem's price can be quenched by the nice BTC rise.. but eventually BTC will stabilize after falling a bit. If it goes down and Steem's price remains where it is, or goes down another 5-10%.. then that's worrysome.

What is the reason for the dropping price? The lack of clarity. The amount of traffic to Steemit is rising, so I trust in the community and that's why I am keeping most of my steem. Also it'd be unwise for anybody to power down fully when it's so low. (The only reason I powered down a bit recently was because I needed to get a couple hundred out to pay for an upcoming bill, the rest is staying for the most part.)

I was looking around for quite a while trying to discern what this "maintenance" is or what it requires from the devs. I find a bunch of other posts talking about it, but for some reason my searches have come up blank with what's going on. I look on trending posts and see no one else really addressing this, and yet this is a major concern for probably many. For the long time believers, this is fine as the price will rise. But I hate to say that unlike some, I don't think BTC will hit $100K+ and Steem will go up to like $10 within some unreasonable amount of time. Don't be stuck with your head up in the clouds..

Can anybody link me to some official documentation? Or is this on Polo's part with the price manipulation? Because this obviously creates a chokepoint for those who are trying to buy Steem.