Why would demand increase when we (really short sighted users who believe that 'rewarding themselves' via their stake is a thing) are inflating ourselves to death, resulting in the value declining month after month? The only logical response to that on the demand side is to stay far away from putting money into it, and even for people already holding Steem to sell it and buy cheaper later. It is actually hurting demand, is self-defeating, and self-destructive.

And, no I don't mean the overall crypto bear market, but our relative value declining to the point where we are worth less than some projects that have no users, no development, etc. There is no explanation for the latter (having and doing nothing being worth more than Steem) other than what we are doing is actively destroying value rather than adding or creating it.

I'm all for onboarding and rewarding of high value content, but if we care at all about self-preservation as a community and project we need to moderate the amount of budget being spent on that so it aligns in magnitude with what the added user base and activity level can absorb in new coins, instead of generating huge imbalanced sell pressure in the market, which is clearly what we have been doing.

BTW, in reply to the OP, @donekim, @burnpost voters don't get anywhere near 50% curation rewards. There are a lot of early votes which return a large portion of the curation rewards to the pool instead of paying to voters. The sensible reason to vote for @burnpost (if one chooses to do so) is because one believes that pulling back a bit on the supply-demand imbalance is ultimately good for Steem. You can easily get better curation rewards elsewhere, even voting (almost) at random.