Come on, lets be serious here.
Steemit was perfectly viable when it was trading at 7 cents yes?
There is no way anyone knew bitcoin would soar to 20k, so that was not built into this model re expectation.
Ned has seen the highs of bitcoin and ridden the wave, made 500 million $ along the way, now steem is down to 33 cents and all of a sudden it is no longer worth it? when it was only 7 cents before? smell a rat yet?

For steem to be taken serious it needs to be decoupled from bitcoin, so any movement in btc does not affect it. The only way to do this is get it on exchanges where it can be bought for fiat, not for btc.

It already is on exchanges like bittrex, though you still have to pay with BTC, more of the same in no way will help.