To increase the Steem price, you need mass adoption among non-crypto ordinary people. The number of active users of a social network defines it's value.

Tokenized social media IS the wave of the future, cutting out the manipulative third party identity sellers, like Facebook.

There is more scope in Steem and EOS, in my opinion (not financial advice), which use the scalable DPOS consensus algorithm, to enter the mass market, and become breakout cryptos, than any other coin, bar Bitcoin itself.

Steemit, as you say, is unappealing to the masses because of it's misaligned incentive structures, which naively focus on investment returns now, rather than using Steem's first-mover advantage to build an active user base of a million people. If the active user base grows to such a level, Brands like Macdonalds and Coca Cola will buy Steem because they will need to be part of it. Where the people are, in social media, the money follows.

SMTs and new applications focused on incentivising mass market adoption by ordinary people are the way to go. The key to putting Steem in its rightful place among the top 5 Cryptos is to create an application that is wholesale designed to entice and retain the general public, be it a tokenized twitter type app, or even a redesigned Steemit, but which is NOT about investors claiming back the inflation from Steem.

Steem ONLY works if the inflation goes to platform growth and recruitment of the general public, and not if investors feel the need to claim it back immediately through bidbots, which ultimately slows the growth and give other tokenized social media platforms, like EOS, the breathing room to catch up with Steem's first-mover advantage.

Caveat: I'm just a redfish, but I still want to be helpful. :)