Yes, there's a mistake in your thinking regarding the soft fork. There was a key reason to do the soft fork now instead of just a hard fork later, and that is because the soft fork enabled the chain to keep the fork listed on exchanges. If either side decides to do a hardfork, they have the additional challenge of getting exchanges to upgrade to the hardfork. This is often a somewhat painful process for exchanges to do for Steem. And if it's done in an atmosphere where there's a split in the community, it's going to leave exchanges scratching their heads as to whether to support both chains, support one, or just dump them both. The soft fork prevented this problem, at least for now. So this choice of timing was for practical economic reasons.

Most of the actual work on Steem and even the front-end was done pretty much at launch or shortly thereafter. The pace of development has been glacially slow since then, partly because of poor management and partly because most of the development funds were being hoarded (I presumed for a rainy day, until I got one big dividend payment as a minority shareholder, when the proceeds of most of those Steem sales were just passed on to Steemit shareholders instead of being used for development). This is generally recognized by most people in the Steem community, and the many failed technology promises from Steemit are another of the big drags on the coin's valuation. The most recent tech manager at Steemit has done better than past tech management, but he's also been forced to operate under a very restricted budget (see below for why).

I get what you're saying about the implicit contract, but here's my take on that: Steemit shareholders != Steem investors. This opened up both a potential and ultimately real misalignment of interests.

Now, if Steemit management had been good at managing marketing and software development, it was possible that the interests of these two groups could have been roughly aligned, since both groups benefited from Steem price appreciation.

And initially, I think Steemit did try to spend more on development. But due to failures in execution, they were getting less of a return in the form of Steem price appreciation than they were spending in Steem coins, and it began to look like the best thing to do from their perspective, was to sell off the coins and pocket the results as dividends (and ultimately just sell the remaining stake at a discount to a third party for cash).