"When I look at Steem, I see a platform that is on par or better in nearly every applicable metric than almost every other cryptocurrency platform in existence - except for the token price."

I am confident that the blockchain and software that powers it is amongst the best in the world, but I cannot agree the token price is the problem. Token price is a symptom. This is revealed by an examination of investing and history, as investment has been undertaken long prior to even the advent of writing in society. Building Gobekli Tepe required investors and that was undertaken around 13000 years ago, long before writing, money, or even settlements are proposed to have been used by people.

Historically, capital gains have proved to be the best mechanism to reward investors for their underwriting of commercial enterprises. Steem fails to promote capital gains in a very demonstrable way, and this can be shown by examining the actions substantial stakeholders have taken. Instead, Steem promotes profiteering, which has dramatically different results than capital gains as incentive for investment. In the movie 'Barbarians at the Gate' from the 1980s, profiteers are shown to extract funds necessary to conduct the business affairs of a commercial enterprise as the primary means of profiting from investment in the company. For example, hostile 'corporate raiders' can purchase a controlling interest in a company and then use their power to direct the sale of company assets, such as the forges, presses, and other manufacturing equipment necessary to conduct business. When firing staff, eliminating marketing and other necessary business activies that create expenses, and so forth, such profiteers can make profits faster in a short period of time than can be possible by improving efficiency, marketing, and other improvements to the investment vehicle (in this example, the investment vehicle would be shares of stock) that raise the price of the investment vehicle and reward investors with capital gains. This has been widely shown to destroy the companies, and the value of the investment vehicles, since that value has been extracted as the assets of the company have been sold off.

That is exactly what votesellers, self voters, and similar bad actors on Steem do. Author and curation rewards are intended to provide incentive to content creators so that they produce content that attracts consumers to Steem, and who then are made aware of the opportunity and purchase Steem. When the market for Steem grows, and people buy it, the price of the token rises, and this creates capital gains for investors. For Steem, this is the equivalent of manufacturing widgets, and the means of production are content creators. Steem's use case, social media, has been proved IRL to be the most successful business model in the world today, as the FAANGS show in their market capitalizations and stock prices.

When bidbots sell their votes to the highest bidder, they do not curate, even though they receive curation rewards for their upvotes, as well as the purchase price for their votes. Creators of quality content aren't rewarded for their work, and investors are driven away from the platform instead of attracted. This is why the market cap of Steem has fallen steadily for the two years I have been here, from the mid-30s on CMC to the mid-60s today.

This happens because rewards encourage stakeholders to extract profit by selling their votes, or voting for themselves or others in collusion. That is only possible because it is possible to control rewards by possessing substantial stake. Further, curation rewards are completely counterproductive to encouraging actual curation - the rewarding of good content creators - by instead encouraging financial manipulation for profit. There is no way to alter curation rewards to prevent this financial incentive from perverting curation from it's necessary purpose. They do not provide substantial incentive to curate at all for stakeholders without substantial stake, and even if they're doubled, they do not. For substantial stakeholders, they only add additional incentive to extract profit by voting on content, and cannot create any incentive to actually curate. No matter how the rate of curation rewards is tweaked, nothing changes these basic incentives. Nothing can cause curation rewards to encourage voting on content based on it's quality, rather than it's potential to provide profit.

Examining my curation rewards on Steemd reveals that they are about 4% of my total rewards, and this is after spending most of my time on Steem curating rather than creating content. Were curation rewards doubled, about 8% of my rewards would come from curation. This is because I am not a dolphin. Whales however can eschew creation and gain substantial rewards from curation and delegation alone, because they have substantial stakes to extract rewards with. Folks besides the 35 whales on Steem today have almost no financial incentive from curation rewards, and for whales, curation rewards and voteselling make creation and actual curation silly, in terms of financial reward. To curate good content they'd need to spend time reading it, and presently all they have to do is delegate to extract curation rewards. Curation would be a huge time sink, and folks with substantial stakes usually have business to conduct. Nonetheless, whales receive ~90% of all rewards today, if not more. The rewards pool is almost entirely devoted to extractive profiteering and this is completely contradictory to it's role encouraging content creation and creating capital gains.

Almost all the rewards of production are extracted instead of creating value in the underlying investment vehicle, Steem, and this is why capital gains cannot happen and market cap keeps shrinking. It's also why the retention rate on Steem is ~7.5% the last time I checked. Seasoned, traditional investors are driven off by capital gains being impossible, and content creators interested in financial compensation quickly realize they are basically financially enslaved by profiteers. Only profiteers are interested in acquiring substantial stakes in Steem today, because only they have financial incentive to do so.

Curation rewards should simply be eliminated so that no incentive to pervert curation is created. In order to create capital gains for investors, the only incentive to upvote posts should be to encourage good content creators to market Steem.

The ability of substantial stakeholders to profit from selling their votes also must be eliminated in order to achieve this same goal. The incentive for investors should be the proven mechanism of capital gains. Any incentive to extract profits from the company (platform) product should be eliminated. By limiting incentive to capital gains, investors will strive to make the investment vehicle more valuable - cause the price of Steem to rise - and every competing mechanism for profit is counterproductive to that purpose. Given that Steem has one of the best blockchains in the world, and has the single best use case for business in the world today, social media, Steem should be the most valuable token on the market. The reason it is not is that the value of the token is extracted by profiteers, and not increased in value so that profits are available to investors as capital gains. The one mechanism that is counterproductive to that capital gains mechanism is the ability of substantial stakeholders to extract profits from rewards.

Tweaking rewards curves, timing of votes, and the myriad tricks that are undertaken to modify this incentive cannot remove the incentive. The only thing such tweaks can do is tweak how profiteering is undertaken to extract the value of rewards. They cannot replace that incentive with incentive to increase the value of the investment vehicle. None of the tweaks proposed in the EIP will give investors incentive to increase the price of Steem. Conversely, all of them as proposed increase the profitability of extracting value from business, and discourage capital gains. EIP will cause the price of Steem to fall, and Steem to fall further on CMC.

Limiting the ability of substantial stake to extract rewards will prevent profiteers from perverting curation for profit. There is a simple way to do that. If a substantial stakeholder can selfvote for 1M Steem and receive a reward of 100 Steem (this is not a calculation, but only a metaphor for the current situation), and similar returns are possible from delegation and circle jerking, the current profiteering is the result. If there was a cap on rewards that limited that return that profiteering would stop. Huey Long made a proposal during the Great Depression that was so attractive to the public being financially abused by banksters that he was assassinated. He proposed that no one should receive less than 3% nor more than 300% of the median income.

I propose that author rewards be limited in exactly that way. Today the median reward is just under .1 SBD.

Median means the amount that most people receive. 3% of that is .003 SBD, roughly $.003. This is an insignificant amount, even for very poor people. 300% of that is .3 SBD, or roughly $.30. Still not much money. Definitely not enough for profiteers to be interested in extracting. However, the average payout today is very different from the median, because the bots and self voters receive almost 95% of the rewards.

The average payout is over 15 times the median. When profiteers no longer are the primary recipients of rewards meant to encourage good content creators, the median will rise towards the average. Almost every content creator will receive dramatically greater rewards for their work. No content creator will be harmed by that. As a creator that has received payouts of over $100 on posts, and receives more than the average payout on my posts now, I would be happy to remain within that payout range.

The reason is that when profiteering is no longer depressing the price of Steem, it's excellent features as a token will be very likely to rapidly increase the price, as investors will then have reason to expect capital gains and buy in. While I may only make 3 Steem for a post, as the price of Steem rises, I'll actually receive much more financial reward. Steem is at about $.35 today. Were it at anything close to it's actual value relative to other cryptocurrencies based on it's functionality and use case - absent extractive profiteering - I'd expect thousands of times more financial reward than is currently reflected in it's token price. Capital gains FTW.

Finally, I predict that EIP will cause a rapid increase in profiteering, and decrease in token price. All substantial stakeholders are now preparing to dump their holdings on the market, to sell before that happens. @Steemit, @Steem, @Steem1, and @Steem3 are all powering down right now. Millions of Steem are being readied to dump before the price plummets and those holdings lose most of their value. EIP looks like the last rapid extraction of value from Steem is being prepared before the profiteers abandon it for the next target of their depredations.

Either we end profiteering and encourage investing for capital gains, or we can kiss Steem goodbye.

Edit: re-reading your OP, I wanted to comment on this statement.

"I've talked to a few large crypto hedge funds and investors in the past and their general criteria for investment is pretty simple and fairly consistent - what is the vision / potential for the project and, more importantly, do they believe there's a good chance it will be realized."

What this neglects is that if capital gains cannot profit investors, there is no reason for them to invest. Hedge funds and investors aren't interested in become serial self-voters. They understand the difference between profiteering and investing. They want to realize capital gains. Make that possible and they'll come.