"Except that the side-effects of the currency skyrocketing is leading to grave issues for the social network side of Steemit, which I'm starting to believe is more of a marketing ploy, to the tune of, "Our cryptocurrency doesn't have value out of nowhere, it's actually backing something!" Except the relationship goes in the other direction, with rewards to work coming out of nowhere, and as such, aren't at all tied to the intrinsic value of said work either..."

You may be spot on. Ned is on record stating they don't really care about Steemit, that SMTs and "tokenizing the web" are the vision.