Thoughts:
Counter to what the OP says, we at SteemSTEM pretty much guarantee decent rewards, certainly far more than a living wage in many countries. We are an exception rather than the rule, though.
However, this still does not bring the vast majority of users to stay on the platform. Why? Maybe it's not all about the money, I'm not sure. Of all the friends I've brought onto the platform, a grand total of Zero use it to this day - even when I could guarantee, with my own personal help in mentoring, $80-100 a post.
One problem is, when that 80-100 becomes 70-90, one's perception is instantly 'steem is dead, it's no longer worth my time and effort when I compare it to the average hourly income at a full time job' or some other crazy comparison.
Another problem is how activity on steem is directly proportional to the value of bitcoin. If Facebook was entirely dependent on the success of Google, it would probably be stuck in the same perpetual spiral of inactivity we see here.
Another problem is that, for the most part, people don't blog. This is why twitter and facebook and snapchat and tiktok and youtube and all the others are so big. Writing long articles is not a favourite past time for the vast majority. People come on here believing it's something they want to do because they also have opinions or whatever, and the money is a good incentive. But when they realise the money isn't an incentive, they simultaneouslly realise they actually hate blogging.
Twitter offers effortless, sub-minute posting, facebook offers all forms of media catering to each and every desire, youtube allows creative freedom to go beyond text documents, to the point of productions reaching into multi-millions of dollars and beyond, and all of the above stand on their own feet, all while allowing you to sign up in 12 seconds.
I guess at the end of the day, my point is, there are so many obvious glaring things that we take for granted on all the other platforms because what they've created simply makes intuitive sense, but this place is so far designed in the least intuitive and flexible way possible, putting the burden of functionality on 'entrepreneurs' who struggle to promise a working model on a salary of basically $0/month.
What should be obvious, is that these entrepreneurs need to get together and build something far more flexible and functional that can work completely independent of the value of BTC, hell, even independent of the value of steem, making monetization merely optional, independent of delegations and so on.
SteemStem are certainly working on this and partnering with a lot of other initiatives because we understand we can't go in on this alone. We are advertising ourselves without even mentioning steemit.com if we can help it. I dunno. there's a gazillion other things to say but...
/ rant
RE: Open letter to a future Steemian