You also miss:

Comments fro spam bots and fake projects.
Botnets flagging or circle voting
Memo spam

So all this if was to be filtered ans non human inteaction will show a clearer picture of the decline.

I think we have new users full of hopes.

But newsteem even if it had the positive effect of killing the out in the open bidbots and temporarly increasing the rewards received from organic curation we already are seeing the decline in that, as the capital finds new way to seize the rewards pool.

You have several ways to go about this:

sell votes in a discord no need for memos, transaction non traceable (i can setup a bot for that in about 10 minutes)
Sell votes via an intermediary BTW oer other SMT UIA blockchain

Split your fortune and stablish a circle jerk
join a whale or dolphin circle jerk

the conclusion is:

Steem is the cheapest hosting service i ever had.
i even get tokens from time to time instead of paying a monthly fee.

It is ugly but steempeak fixed that.

It costed me a lot in inscription fees: no one forced me to buy steem i could have farmed it like most have done.

Steem is rotten from the inside, no amount of HF can fix greed and stupid