Interesting post, David. However, no matter how one turns it, there's a fundamental design flaw: the money that content creators receive eventually comes from Steemit investors. It does not come from ads. It does not come from the consumers of the content. Therefore, there's no point whatsoever in using Steem as a long-term investment. Even worse, content creators mostly benefit from Steemit, whereas investors mostly pay for it. As such, I would argue that Steem functions as a pyramid scheme - more sophisticated than Bitconnect, for sure - but still a pyramid scheme.