I believe your analysis is correct, I believe your solution is way way incorrect. 

Serious investors are only going to keep money in a project as long as they can see genuine project growth. Steemit is an awesome platform with a great idea. However people are only going to buy so much to be able to utilize the platform. You rely on bigger investors and earners holding their coins. That won't happen. Everyone is always going to cash out until the money is depleted... 100% of the time. You will not in the long term bring in more than you pay out. 

This is why serious investors will eventually drop the coin. I am saying this in hopes that you guys fix some of these things. You need things outside the sale of the coins themselves to bring in money. 

A MASS call to action to encourage people to signup anonymously as I did is would be a great start, as they spend money to create the account itself and it isn't so much the "freebe". 

I would also suggest creating some features like they have on medium and offer people the ability to create more of a "publication" where they can organize their own posts by categories, chose from a few layout templates for their blog pages, and add a link offsite (would be great to encourage project owners to publish whitepapers and such here) - all for a fee of course. 

Further an option allowing them to register domains and properly point them at their blog pages (last I knew there was a 1 time $300 fee on medium for the domain feature). 

These are just a few suggestions on ways to bring in money outside the sale of the coins themselves. If you genuinely want to keep big dollars in your coins, you need to give reasons to keep money in your coins - and growing from outside sales is the best way to do that.