There are several problems that cause the steem to go down.

First: little activity and creation of new accounts.
Second: the shutdown of large users.
third: the sale of liquid steem from the main account of @steemit to pay operating personnel, although that seems to be solved, but the last months were a disaster !.
fourth: many steem retained in exchanges more than 15k I think!
fifth: and most importantly the lack of investment, it is useless to bring all the steem of the exchanges, that alone would make the steem go up about 40 cents of dollar, the most important thing is to bring new money from large investors.

You can create many applications, tokens, etc. It can be a visibly perfect social network, but if there is no investment this will go to hell very soon. People are getting tired and they are retiring and we can not allow that.