Nobody knows. I think Steem will be inflated because it already has too many tokens floating around and the last time I check, there's no hard cap on how many more can be produced.
Issue with Steem as a blockchain is that there are no current development on the blockchain itself. A few original Steem apps left Steem blockchain and adopt either their own or a different blockchain (Dlive for example). Partially sell pressure came from those guys and also whales who are no longer satisfied with the current stagnant state of Steem blockchain.
Final point, there is no outside monetary coming into Steemit blog. Usually blog gets monetized by ads or data mining. However, the people who actually buy Steem/SBD are people who try to make Steem/SBD. So a little of a ponzi scheme exists in the premise of Steemit as a blogging platform.
Steemit as a blog can die but as long as the Steem blockchain lives on and become more open sourced, then maybe we'll see the potential of this thing takes off.
Thanks for describing the scenario so concisely - I think you are seeing it for what it is.
I've seen some beautifully motivated Steemit promoting souls, both amongst the technically able crowd, witnesses included, and amongst the socially sensible authors just publishing here for the sake of sharing their thoughts. It is a pity the gaps for exploiting the system apparently have to exist in order for the system to work, allowing selfishly motivated heavy-weights to gain too much ground, messing entry level motivation up. This seems to leave the Steemit economy in much the same condition as the real world economy it was supposed to help counter.