Great article. I have a few considerations here, and please point out any concepts I missed in your article, because you provided a lot of good information.

The first thing I want to mention is that I don't believe the creators ever intended SMD to be used as a general purpose currency. It was strictly just supposed to be "influence" and "power" on the platform. I remember Ned and Dan talking about this one one interview they conducted. They explicitly stated that this was something new and different. Their hypothesis was that value for Steem could be created by enlarging the community around the coin and platform. 

This also answers your question about how the platform creates demand for Steem. Apparently, demand is created as a result of people seeing value in the currency for various reasons. Someone mentioned that some companies would want to buy Steem power just for the purposes of promoting certain articles or pieces of content, and Ned mentioned that they have already been asked how to go about doing this. 

However, in one of the comments below, you do say that an advertising function could be given to the authors to promote their material. I am certainly not against this idea, and that could come in handy. The creators did say that they expect a lot of different businesses to be built on top of Steem since it is open source. 

Again, good job on the analysis, because I share many of your concerns, but perhaps I am just more optimistic. But even if it fails, this idea will eventually be perfected, as I am sure you agree. 

In my mind, this suggests that there are a lot of ways, many of which have not been imagined yet, for continuing to add value to Steem as a cryptotoken.