Thanks for digging into this and coming up with some answers. Reading the comments it seems you've pretty much got an answer to your questions. Bottom line, we really need STINC to stay up and running to pay for a lot of the infrastructure for the time being. But we clearly need to transition away from that reliance. For one thing, because it clearly is being done by them selling massive amounts of STEEM, even at these abysmal prices at which the rest of us are being encouraged to power up and hodl.

Just like corporate stock buybacks prop up the stock price, this approach to infrastructure financing naturally depresses coin prices. We are really noticing it now because of the crash of the last week or so, but this has always been a negative force at play.