I think the issue with the low STEEM price can only be tackled if external investors are convinced to buy STEEM as a long-time investment and advertisement dollars are used to fuel the payouts for authors.

Although the 30day limit on payout really is bad. An author should earn for his post as long people are voting for it.

Maybe with the earnings of the advertisements Steemit Inc. will be able to afford to pay the 2 founders a decent salary so the founders don't have to sell their STEEM every week sending the STEEM price into a downward spiral.

This is just an observation but ned and dan were not able to explain why they won't stop selling their STEEM. If the 2 founders are selling their "shares" in STEEM this doesn't make me confident as a STEEM Investor. When I invested over 30 BTC into STEEM as an investment, nobody told me that the founders would be selling huge amounts of STEEM every week thus I lost 95% of my investment...

If I were one of the founders the first thing I would do is: Make a post writing something like: I am the founder of Steemit and I stopped powering down, I believe in my own site, my own product and I promise to not power-down for the next 2 years....

Anyway, I am in fulltime and 100% believe in the concept of token based economies. Will Steemit survive? Maybe, but I am betting my 30BTC + 3 month fulltime blogging on Steemit that STEEM will survive and disrupt the Social Media Area forever!