Nailed it buddy, you are rephrasing almost all of my point.

1. Abuse the #steem chain can be easy, and I'm hoping someone at the #hive chain would come up with some function, when hit the Submit button and automatically cross post to #steem chain with a footer, something like cross posted from #hive 😆 if they can do it in steempeak now, I think they can do it in hivepeak in the future, don't you think? God I hated that function, but I wouldn't mind do it from Hive to Steem now!
2. I know the pump and dump thing, since I trading through the financial market since 1999. I had enough margin call to see what are the moves. There's just not enough time to power down for retailer like you and me, so I won't be even bother to try. Besides, it's only 2 days aways from Hive go live, and by then Justin would have collected back his stake and ready to buy back some "humans" by giving free votes(which not supposed to because over the long run it will create hyper inflation with the amount of stake they had). More than interested to see, how he can turn this piece around. As we were speaking, check out steem pump! Imagine, they're still on their way powering down for few days, not even first week. Guess who is doing what? LOL
3. Old witnesses doesn't have to fight the battle to fight. There's nothing loss if keep running on steem chain. Keep hogging their top witnesses seat to delay them taking over for the fork! I'm sure the Korean aren't stupid, the Zzan's are trying to gain some group to the top to have some control of their portion. Funny thing is, why @clayop and @proxy.token disabled their own witnesses. I only wish I understand Korean a little bit better. The language is as complicated as Chinese, translator doesn't work.
4. As you have mentioned

I think you are narrowing the sight about how the price is determining only to pure speculation on exchanges, I think that if Steem had managed to become an utility token, then it would have a more solid base price... I think that witnesses behind Hive will deploy SMT very fast, and more dapps will be released with their own SMT.
There's no more developer in Steemit, what left are their Tron developer that does best at gambling app. So, SMT will just be another DAPP that relies heavily on steem-engine token, in this case Steemon or Tronit ERC20 STRX and worth fraction of TRX. So, if I don't view Steem at speculation purpose, they are virtually worth aboslutely no value anymore.

1. Steem engine pegs, as I stated, as you confirmed, chances are going to have HIVEPegged.

Thanks for input !tip