The goal shouldn't be to directly manipulate the price, but rather to rearrange the health of the company so that the stock price goes up as a reflection of the business reality

A lot of people think that the "shareholder value" movement in corporate governance has been a problem in that it led to lots of short-term thinking and financial engineering to produce numbers that looked good rather than robust, healthy businesses. Why not just try to build a robust, healthy business directly and treat the stock price as something that can be easily disconnected from long term value by chaotic trading? (Asked partly, but not completely, in a devil's advocate sense).

What's really needed (IMO) is leadership, vision, and action. If those things are cultivated, incentives will follow.

I agree. But it seems like with the current social dynamics of the chain, the only leadership people seem inclined to follow requires already having lots of money. I can't see any reason why an outsider with lots of money would want to use it to come fix the issues in this ecosystem when they could do literally anything else with their resources. So I think the ecosystem has to try to grow and fix itself from within rather than trying to lure in outsiders.

We don't really have lots of debt

I was using that as an analogy of the kinds of problems a business could have, not a problem I was saying Steem literally has. Steem has some other problems, like the dominance of the vote-bot business model, the PR landmines that the Hive split seeded into the world that make it harder for the owners of the Steemit stake to take a leadership role without being accused of undermining decentralization, and other things.