You doubt the power of exchanges.
I'm not asking @freedom to power down and sell on exchanges. @freedom makes passive income from delegating his/her SP.
When price is low, the STEEM ecosystem is not as profitable. Renting delegation thus becomes cheaper and ROI for @freedom goes down. Also, the value of @freedom's holdings are low when the price is low. Investors can come in and buy up cheap and do what @freedom does and cut into his/her business. It is in the best interest of @freedom to have the STEEM ecosystem healthy, profitable, and the price high to keep ROI high and limit investors from cutting into his/her business.
Also, bringing outside investors to STEEM to power up thins the reward pool and also cuts into profits for everyone. That indirectly affects @freedom's bottom line. For that reason, I can't imagine that @freedom would support a contest to see who can bring in the biggest account.
In terms of numbers, single exchanges have orders of magnitude of MAU vs the the entire STEEM MAU. Did you notice the huge jump in STEEM and SBD price? That is NOT caused by investors, @ned showing, or users powering up. Believe me I know, I study it every single day. The reason is the simple fact that news of unfreezing STEEM wallets on Bithumb. If you could read Korean, you would see that there is a bunch of talk about it. Just based on that news alone STEEM price has shot up. In fact, UpBit exchange has taken over the STEEM and SBD trading volume by 4 to 5 times of Binance. UpBit is the Korean language only exchange. Bithumb had these wallets frozen for a long time. The news of unfreezing of those wallets has a similar effect as if the exchange was going to list the coin for the very first time. Any time a currency is listed on a major exchange, it is like a shot of steroids for the coin.
listing on smaller exchanges can have the same effect if several small exchanges were to list the coin.
I've also watched accounts like theycallmedan where they show up with tons of money and power up all while price continues to fall. So by that, you should be able to gauge minimum investment that would be needed to make a difference. It would have to be massive. With that said, I do agree with you that investors and huge advertisements could make an improvement as long as there are serious amounts of money and massive advertisement campaign. The question is how are you going to make that happen? I don't know. I do know that @freedom can cover the cost of exchange listings and it will improve his/her bottom line. That is something that is realistic.