You got the facts right but I think you are drawing the wrong conclusions.

The point is creating an ecosystem and platform that is set up in a way that encourages people to buy in at all.

And for this you need a unique selling point. Content worth reading and readers worth writing for. Without those two anyone better off buying bitcoin.

Without creating incentives for people to want to become a whale or dolphin the platform dies.

Then the platform will die because content is the incentive and content is going down.

Becoming a whale costs currently 506'127.337 Steem which sells for 71'527.43 US$. Anyone who has much money to invest in crypto would invest in Bitcoin. I certainly would. Whales who are in for crypto profit will not save the platform.

It's much easier to incentivise some to invest the 71.52 US$ to become minnow or 715.27 US$ to become dolphin. But the way the platform presents itself right now even that difficult to impossible.

A minnow upvote is currently worth 0.007 SBD. That's about ⅓ of the dust value. Not enough to properly reward an author or do a meaningful self upvote. Why would any plankton upgrade their account?

With the low price I could buy myself into being a dolphin. But why should I? The falling price doesn't frighten me. I'm a contrarian. But the unique selling point of the planform is gone. I would just throw good money after bad money. Rather buy more Bitcoin, Litecoin or Ether.

If the last hard fork had done something to promote content, help the small guy, improve profits for postings below 20 SBD, curb bods and dust down-voters then I would be buying because I could see the platform pick up steam again (pun intended).

But as it is all i see is a Ponzi scheme where the dozen whales are squeezing the last juice out before the final collapse.

It's been shown through countless models that when people receive something for free they don't value it, same with free steem, it gets sold.

Only whales receive something for free by self upvoting or, thanks to the new 50/50 shares, by upvoting in general. Everybody else would need to write good articles and comments. In theory. In praxis good articles aren't properly rewarded.

Maybe that is the reason some whales power down and sell. They got all the free stuff and are now selling it.

But even the whales upvotes aren't worth much any more:

>Steem-From-VEST-With-Vote.rb 1000000 10000000 100000000 1000000000 
    1000000.000000 VESTS =         506.129 STEEM, 100% Upvote:  0.007 SBD
   10000000.000000 VESTS =        5061.287 STEEM, 100% Upvote:  0.070 SBD
  100000000.000000 VESTS =       50612.873 STEEM, 100% Upvote:  0.704 SBD
 1000000000.000000 VESTS =      506128.730 STEEM, 100% Upvote:  7.041 SBD

As I said: you got the facts right.