Ironically (if it is ironic) I think the more people invest to just get a speculative return, especially a quick return, the worse it might be for steem, because ordinary content creators would probably rather see more stability than constant price fluctations.

Truth!

and I concede for sure that there's some great dapp development on the steem blockchain. The only concern right now is that not too many of them "stick" -- seems like there's always a few flavors of the month... I'd like to see some useful dapps that grow over time and maintain their core audience along the way.