That's really unfortunate - I am still predicting that the market will recover sufficiently in the relatively near future (once bigger investors figure out which one of the schizophrenic bitcoin fragments to support) - but I appreciate that paying staff based on hopeful predictions is not practical.

Ultimately, a decentralised platform needs to be truly that - with much more input from an active and skilled community. My urgent suggestion is to look into adjusting rewards pool payouts to allow for funds to somehow be directed towards Steem and Steemit development specifically. Perhaps utopian can do this alone. I don't know how practical it is to get more community involvement into coding the systems, but it is surely an ideal solution to some of the challenges.

Ultimately a community cohesion is needed and I feel it is partially missing due to the previous low level of communication and interaction between the development team at Steemit inc. and the talented community that uses the system.

In any case, I will continue attempting to improve on the onboarding process via @steempassport and I would like to see more such projects from the community, so that we can truly say that Steem is a decentralised system.

UPDATE: Here's my video response to this situation, calling for more decentralisation as a solution here.