I formally welcome you to join the Tauchain Telegram if you have the time. The brain power of an economist and mechanism design expert such as yourself could be appreciated by such an ambitious project. https://t.me/tauchain

There is also an IRC and a website: http://www.idni.org and https://github.com/IDNI/TML

As for Steem, I've tried both honest approaches and mainstream approaches with limited success. In my opinion curation still appears to be broken at this time but I admit it is slightly better (for now) than it was. The issue right now is that people still are using the upvote bots and also an issue you highlight succinctly was that there is no revenue input mechanism (advertisement or subscription or anything) nor is there profit sharing mechanisms.

Without revenue inputs, without profit sharing, I just don't see how the Steem token price can go anywhere but down, as it's not hard to figure out that a company or an ecosystem with no revenue will go down. You also importantly highlight that Steem operating with a falling token price is like a zero sum game where the participants essentially compete for a shrinking reward pool. This unfortunately circumstance brings out the worst in humanity, in any market, and predictable consequences have emerged from this which in my opinion might not be as exacerbated if the token price were moving in the right direction.

I hope for the best with Steem but if things fail then I hope we learn the lessons from Steem and do not duplicate them on future projects being worked out.