I continue to blog and mostly power up simply because I enjoy blogging, and I have made a number of friends in the community.
I think that if more people just did this, the price would eventually follow the activity. People can't grind away for low value forever, even though they can consume high price and low value forever :)
The Steem ATL was actually on my birthday in 2017 - I didn't even know the price at the time, as I don't think I started trading anything (I knew nothing before) until the end of March or April.
I really hope that the new people who come in here will find a lot more, plus more fun stuff to do. I think that communities can be great for focusing attention on at the start, both for content creation and consumption.