The economics that you pointed out can be simplified to the fact that there is excessive steem out there right now. In a normal economy that operates on an inflationary currency, they would aim to reduce inflation. In the case of STEEM, inflation is programmed and can only be changed with a HF. Its sort of like playing the role of the FEDs. Not everyone would agree with this method since it sort of ties into the whole centralized idea, but none of the less it is the traditional model to control the downward spiral of a currency.
What can we do to combat this if we aren't willing to change inflation rate?
Reduce the supply by adding new users? Thats a secondary problem. The primary problem to solve is why people arent willing to power up their liquid steem to constrict the supply.
One reason is steemit inc is dumping hard and the other reason is inflation is high enough that it becomes a free piggy bank for people to extract money out of. All bad things that can be controlled by the classic method of changing the inflation rate, but then the rewards for the honest users dry up. Quite frankly, its a double edge sword no matter how you cut it and while you can be optimistic that the growth can save us, the reality is that we have no mechanism to stabilize the steem economy right now, its purely free market.
Agreed, it's complicated. Since we have such a poor distribution another tactic is to just know the value will continue to come down some until we can create more value, more things to spend Steem on and some demand for new accounts.
The digital economy (pure digital transactions, similar to steem monsters) is not a reliable economy right now because it produces nothing of useful to keep us living and breathing (at least that i can see right now).
And thats where I'm divided the most. If steem is treated like a real world currency, then its value in USD has great importance. If steem is treated like a digital world currency, how its priced in USD has no meaning, so as long as we price things in steem and keep it stable for digital goods. If that is the case then people may continue to pour in cash (similar to how a traveler goes on vacation where they can leverage exchange rates).
It can go so many ways, and unfortunately there is no driver for it to go anyway at the moment except down because of market forces.