Why is that? There is like 20 thousand new posts created on Steem every day. But with no content discovery mechanism people are unable to find good pieces. And if most of the good posts never reach their readers, nobody will reward them. Then in turn, if good posts often don’t get good rewards, there is no incentive to search for them and upvote them (other than purely altruistic). In this situation there is just no reason why people should power up.
I think you're absolutely right. I think if more users used interfaces like Steeve.app and SteemPeak (which allows users to browse posts curated by curation teams, the situation would be a lot better. I also think Steemit is partially to blame, as they had plenty of time to implement something to help improve the situation. Of course, many of us relied on them, and that was a mistake. Now we're moving to other interfaces. But a large number still use a platform where it's very difficult to discover good content, and that's a problem.