High volatility means ridiculous cognitive load (who the hell wants to adjust their subscription amounts every month, and for creators it means adjusting requested sponsorship levels for status or benefits) and also less willingness to hold onto the coin for non-investors.

The whole crypto ecosystem is moving rapidly toward stablecoins for everything other than explicit investment/speculation. Agree with parent comment.

Completely agree with all of this. My point was not to dismiss the usefulness of a stable-coin or a functional SBD, but rather the insistence on it or assuming that it is required for this to even work. This would imo result in a chicken or the egg problem, as I believe we need solutions like this to have a functional economy and thus get the SBD back to its peg.

Also, if Steem is to become an attractive and functional platform economy, then at some point it can't be all about the fiat values of the tokens, but people seeing value in the token itself and wanting to use it for its own sake. To get there, we need meaningful ways for people to spend SBDs. Short term, most will for sure get sold to fiat by the creators who want to monetize it. But then over time, adding options like paying for web hosting with SBD (as we currently enable ourselves), having things like steemfests where people buy tickets with SBDs, merch items, etc. Then slowly but surely people will not look to transfer their earned SBD for fiat, but for goods and services, and we'll be on track to sustainably growing this place.