Thanks for making a short and easily understandable explanation of what the current problems are, and some potential solutions to it. 

I personally think that it's time for Steemit Inc. to put up some ads in order to get a cash flow of fiat money. That way they can keep going independently of how the market develops in the next year. I would love it if they made it in a way where only blog feeds / trending had ads, but then allowed each user to opt for showing ads. The ones who opt to show ads on their blog post should then get a cut of the revenue just like how YouTube or any other media platform share the ad revenue with content creators.