I still don't really understand why Steemit need steem.
But the fact is that for us to pay for small videos, posts and so on, we need to be able to pay very few. Under a cent. I wouldn't be surprised if the price of steem were always low. The price of steem does not need to skyrocket for Steemit to be useful.
You may earn a hundred dolars by getting 1 or 10000 steems, it doesn't matter. The point is we're building a web were the content creators are paid by the viewers. This should greatly enhance the quality of the content regardless of steem's price.