Because there's no intrinsic mechanism on the top side I think you need to talk about "above" and "below" differently (especially because some people have believed that a price above $1 is good, and some manipulations may have been pursued with that philosophy in mind). How much time has it been below the haircut price?

In the past? It is hard to say, as there is currently no straightforward way to extract and analyze historical data. Maybe we should start tracking such data, as having the tools to analyze economic patterns is an underexplored area by developers.

There were discussions in the past regarding the implementation of bidirectional conversion, but it was never implemented.

IMO, the decisionmakers let the perfect be the enemy of the good by demanding bots and multi-sig when the "use DAO SBDs to buy-and-burn Steem" idea was on the table. In the fiat economy teenagers are routinely trusted to handle hundreds of dollars of cash in retail establishments, an individual account (or several) could have done manual buy-and-burns with DAO funding (at least as a stopgap) and been monitored and have their funding cut off if they weren't doing the job.

Several witnesses and stakeholders have expressed opposition to the idea of a buy-and-burn approach using the DAO, and we can understand their concerns. If the goal is to reduce the debt ratio by removing SBD from circulation, the most transparent way to do so based on DAO usage is to send the SBD directly to @null, or to convert it to STEEM. Then send the resulting STEEM to @null. @null. Both of which achieve the same outcome.

Buying STEEM, on the other hand, could artificially raise its price without actual demand, which introduces ethical concerns and fairness issues, especially for external holders. A similar situation occurred when SBD traded above 5 USD, raising discussions on how to communicate risks and expectations to individuals who entered the market at those elevated prices and were likely to incur significant losses. Some even believe that this is what caused the SBD to be delisted from UPBIT considering that some witnesses were vocal about it. But in truth, we will never know for sure.

Another proposed complementary solution that was never implemented is to modify the code so that the treasury fund is excluded from the inflation calculation. Only SBD actively circulating in the market would be considered, which could offer a more accurate representation of the real debt burden on the system.

PS: Both of the mentioned solutions that we did no implement are already implemented on a competing chain and are playing a role in maintaining their peg. A case study to check.