Yours is one of the best article's I've read on the STEEM-BTC pricing situation. I think, while most crypto is highly indexed to BTC, steem is probably a bit more tied to fiat/USD due to the high costs of running servers and people cashing out to support life stuff. If that is the case then MIRA (and other updates) might stem that outflow a little and allow prices to index more closely to BTC movements.
I some ways, it's good to have a token that's known for moving differently to BTC. The reason is that it gives the BTC traders somewhere to jump when BTC gets speed wobbles. Mind you, if that happened wholesale then the value of steem would fluctuate very very wildly.
I'm not bothered about the steem price in the short term. The fundamentals for steem are more about the number of active users anyway.
All the alts became the next target for speculative money right after the last BTC all time high. Bitcoin peaked on December 18. A couple of weeks later on January 3, STEEM peaked at slightly over $8. Dozens of alts popped around the same time.
If the price of STEEM were solely determined by its fundamentals right now, that would actually be a scary prospect. The most high traffic Steem app is DrugWars and it only has about 5000 daily active users. It is hard to overstate how pitiful that number is. That kind of numbers cannot possibly allow the Steem infrastructure to be run and development costs covered by generating sufficient ad revenue. The STEEM price is still overwhelmingly based on future expectations and thus somewhat speculative. That's why it was horrible for Steemit Inc waste the massive opportunities afforded by the run from 7 cents in March 2017 to the ATH inJanuary 2018 and to November 2018 when the price crashed. It was nearly unforgivable.
What I'm really hoping for is a high correlation between the prices of BTC and STEEM. That would take the market cap of Steem back to a multi billion dollar level and allow Steemit Inc and various app and side chain developers to really ramp up their work in preparation of mass adoption.