There's a lot going through my head while reading this, so here it goes...
My first thought is that I think another comparison that could be made is real estate investing. You have the speculator and the cashflow investor. The speculators are out here in California buying $3 million homes and losing money each month with the thought that it'll go up in value each year by 10-15% and make it all worth it. Meanwhile, in places like Arkansas, you have cashflow investors buying $90k homes and making 200-300 per month in net profits on about $20k down. Obviously, the cashflow play is a much smarter and safer form of investment over the long term since you're hedging against any potential depreciation in the price of the real estate with the cashflow.
My second thought is the difference between a dividend stock and SP. You have to actually put in work to make that SP generate that income. You don't have to do a single thing for that dividend stock to generate income. I think that's a very important distinction to make here.
My next thought is about investing in building up SP coming from someone who just joined last month. I've been studying the STEEM charts a lot over the last month and the trends keep showing a gradual decline since the peak on June 7th both against the USD and BTC. This makes me hesitant to want to start putting any real money into it until a real bottom forms. What's to say that it doesn't go back to April's numbers, which based on historic numbers seems to be where it's been more often than not. I really want to build my SP, but I just don't want to be that sucker that buys in for $10k SP that's worth half that in 3 months because it kept falling. Then think about how much longer it would take me to recoup that value even with the cashflow from the voting. Now if I'd be here since January, I probably would have happily put that $10k in because at least it was stable even though it wasn't worth much.
My last thought that I want to share here is that I do have faith in the long term viability of the platform thanks to people like you, @jesta and the other great minds that are building outside of Steemit. It will be niche audiences on custom domains built on top of the STEEM blockchain that will create the demand that STEEM needs to keep thriving. For example, I have a page on Facebook with 1.7 million fans that makes me $600/day just posting links to sites like Bored Panda or LittleThings, but I can't send them Steemit.com and make money because 1. no one has accounts to vote 2. views mean nothing without votes 3. no one in that audience understands cryptocurrencies or blockchain. Steemit.com just confuses them. That's the major hurdle we face here!
And now that I've written all this, I realize I should probably take most of this and turn it into an actual post. :)