I can tell that being shown under Trending does indeed generate a lot of clicks, and therefore reads, and thereby is significantly more valuable than not being there. The absolute value of these views / reads is debatable, and overall traffic, no matter where, in the crypto space is generally low.

I can only reiterate what I've been suggesting for hardly anybody could ever live off the payouts at such a low price.

I don't know exactly what such a Steem(it) would look like nowadays, but it would definitely take more example in the existing incumbents of content and media which have attracted a vast audience without any monetary expectations (at least as they were a similar size as Steem is now).

Maybe this would be very disappoining for investors in STEEM, but in the short-term price matters too little. STEEM price will only reach new sustainable ATHs if Steem grows significantly. I would advocate on spending the time and energy on building better clients (e.g. use-case specific, or offer whitelabel discussion platforms that can be curated using Steem Engine tokens or SMTs), or improving the protocol (e.g. work on improved Sybil attack resistance if that is considered a huge problem).

That said, I shall probably stop discussing Hive account@sbdpotato and Hive account@burnpost now myself and just let everyone do whatever they deem is best for the network, even if I think they're wrong. At least I gotta admit that it's well-intended :-)