I'm guessing most of your statements are rhetorical, but I will respond anyhow.

It has little to do with how much you could potentially make outside of STEEM, and everything to do with how much the reward pool can sustain on STEEM as a platform. If you scale up the STEEM price, I would expect the potential reward in dollar amount to scale up as well. As far as the reward pool covering your sunk costs, the potential is there, but the expectation shouldn't be.

As far as using STEEM as a medium of exchange for trading game items, if you can make more money doing that, more power to you. I buy and sell Splinterlands cards using steem all the time.

!ENGAGE 25