There's a lot to unwrap here, but since you took the time to lay it all out, I want to address it all.
EIP:
Is the economic stability of steem any better off with the EIP as of today? If the answer is well of course not but all crypto is in the tank, then the EIP is still a miserable failure because it has done nothing to separate STEEM from any of the other crypto-coins. EIP ='d Economic Improvement Plan. So far I have not seen any improvement in the economic stability of Steem.
So the main purpose of the EIP wasn't to increase the price of Steem, it was to stop abuse. Or at least what most people considered abuse. The major players being whales that delegate all their stake to bidbots, whales that break their stake into tons of smaller accounts and upvote themselves in a death by a thousand cuts sort of way, and farmers that that milk the reward pool by spamming thousands of worthless posts and upvoting them pennies for a macro large return. This sort of thing was also really difficult to track and stop in the old system.
The EIP combined with the separate downvote pool pretty much killed all of these. This doesn't change the fact that a large amount of Steem is on exchanges and is being traded as a mechanism to get a return like almost all cryptos. That's why everything moves w Bitcoin, it's just traders playing that game, it has nothing to do with what's going on here when we see these large total crypto market moves.
The money not being used in the SPS isn't going anywhere, if anything it has the opposite effect of what you're suggesting because whatever is locked up in the SPS isn't getting sold. Also the SPS is decentralized, if the stakeholders aren't excited by what they see, things won't get funded. Personally I've supported several but truth be told, nothing that's been proposed has me insanely excited, and I'm not outraged that the things that had their funding removed had it removed. I'd rather we had some stuff being worked on rather than nothing, but meh.
Whether people like them or not, downvotes are a critical part of the system. Without them, this entire thing would just be a cesspool of abuse. Period.
The reason Communities will make this situation better is because it will fracture the community, which needs to happen. No one person or even group of people will have the bandwidth to go through every single community and downvote people for no reason. Also, people will be able to launch their own tokens within their communities. You mentioned Appics, they have APX and it has value. As long as the project can maintain token value, the users don't need to be rewarded in Steem, they can just be rewarded in APX. If you use Appics much you can see quickly that a lot of those users will never cross over to the blogging/Steem side of things. They are exclusively using Appics. With the introduction of SMT's I think this will be the trend going forward.
Yes, but it is also the case that a lot of Steem GOES OUT to exchanges constantly. We killed the bidbots, yes, but there is a massive amount of activity that still goes on for no purposes other than for people to get paid Steem every day so they can dump it.
By my very, very, very rough estimation there is about twice as much Steem going out as there is interest from investors to buy in.
As long as that is going on, the price (and Steem with it) is in for continued pain.
EIP gave us the tools, but we need to be using those tools to direct those Steem rewards where they will do the most good. So far there is still only about 1% downvotes. That's not enough. Too many people are still content to see $10 or $20 or $50 getting milked out in various ways, albeit somewhat different ways than before EIP, and think that "it isn't my problem".
A few active downvoters can't take responsibility for everything. EIP was a step in the right direction, but without more participation, not enough of one.
Ugh. That will likely mean even more Steem being milked in hidden ways and places on the platform, and a harder time for the few people who actually care enough to act to actually find it. Maybe that will be good for a few of the various new tokens, but it won't be good for Steem.
Like I said I will still be here, I have always thought the down vote system is broken. If and when they make a comment a part of the down vote so that people and communities can rally around the wrongful seeming down vote, then I will see it as being fixed.
Offering someone funds for a guarantee from the fund seeker that they will not pull their project and will continue to support steem for one year, only to retain the right to pull that funding and still expect the project to maintain it's support of steem is wrong. the SPS will not work until they work the bugs out. I understand they do not want to go with more of a few well known here let us give you some steem support, only to have the projects jump out of steem abusing the support, cases. Abusing the developers in the same manner is wrong. Strictly just my opinion.
I will wait on the communities and see what happens. Steemit was a grand experiment, it was bringing people from all over the world and all walks of life, it was beginning to become it's own unique world society, it was uniting people. Communities or the concept that people are spreading, is more as you put it:
I hope communities do not lead to a fracturing of the steem block chain society, but it likely will. So all the artist can go to their little corner of the chain society, all the developers can have their little corner of the chain society, all the authors and the photographers can have their little corner of the chain society, meanwhile the people that like to read and look at content will now have a dozen or more channels to surf through, looking for something entertaining or something that catches their fancy all with out the usefulness of a Steem Chain version of TV Guide to see what is on.
A wait and see hold pattern for me, but I will still be here in two years, if steem block chain survives that long.