Development, by a team and by the community, is the way to $10 steem. I promise, if enough quality development is done and enough variety of options is provided by and for the community at large, in new and unique ways, there will be plenty of inward coming cash flow across the board. There just needs to be more effort into that across the board. It seems that those who have been here for a while though, are a bit nervous as to whether things will ever recover, so they are in a stalemate with their own ideas of value of time invested. They're worried they'll put in time, develop something, and steem/sbd will crash into the ground.
The reality is, there are many massive stakeholders that will sell off a lot of steem, even when it rises to .30-.40$, so unless the community is buying it and holding onto it and continuing to earn/produce/hold onto it, it will continue to cycle as such. Most things in life are cyclical or habitual and trends with values of cryptos are no different. A lot of it has to do with the fact that in these cases, emotion is tied in heavily. It's hard to fight emotions, especially fear. When there's a legitimate fear of losing something completely, it's much harder to invest yourself fully into something. If the united states government said right now that they would forever and always back steem at a 1:1 ratio, to the usd, we would see an incredible pop/boost/influx of development. People would be certain, because a government is ensuring it, that they would earn something worth a dollar, thus removing that fear. Without the fear of loss present, so much can be achieved, but when it is present, it can be crippling/stunting/cause use to freeze and wait.
Progress is the action of moving forward, of advancing. We cannot do that if people are standing still, waiting to see what happens here. Not developing, not producing anything truly new or unique. Progress requires motion, it requires action, not passive behavior.