Would steem fail? Perhaps though it depends on the required outcome. I'm fairly sure that the developers could walk away now with significant return on investment and count steemit as a massive success.

Steemit was advertised to me as a content platfrm that rewarded quality content by offering users a way to directly reward content providers with the platform rewarding users for doing so.

That isn't what its doing or what it has ever done. So as it stands steemit is already a failure in that regard.

We as a community need to know what we want steemit to be and judge it accordingly. The steemit's user base will decide whether we judge well or poorly. The value of the currency is somewhat irrelevant to that.