To put it all in a more succinct, perhaps more accessible way…

In order for people to trade one thing for another, they have to perceive that it has value to them. Money with numbers attached is just how we keep score. The underlying valuation is just one more game.

In theory, the underlying value of STEEM is the pleasure/gratification that an individual consumer of the content will get from the act of consumption. In theory, taken as an aggregate, the value of STEEM is roughly analogous in a relative sense to the amount of gratification that individuals will get out of the content posted to the blockchain.

Maybe the real problem is that the value of the commodity is actually accurately conveying that aggregate value. When the value was high, more people were posting a wider variety of things to the blockchain, keeping more people interested in engaging with it. As the value fell, less diverse and less interesting content got posted to the blockchain, which resulted in less valuation for the underlying token. Maybe the problem is that it's a good proxy.

(There are a dozen really good attacks on this idea, starting with the fact that the value of STEEM has tracked pretty well with bitcoin over the last several years, and the value of bitcoin is clearly unrelated to the quality of content on the Steem blockchain. It would be interesting to plot the value of STEEM corrected for the value of bitcoin itself, perhaps by simple ratio, and see if that tracks our general sentiment about the content on the platform.)