Another distant possibility I can't rule out somehow is, that the Larimers are indeed geniuses, and everything is going extremely well, as planned.
The condition under which this came true would be met, if Steem was a project ordered by a social media major, with everything thats happening now just as a test run, and everything published now being viewed as demo content for making a good showcase.
If that cat would jump out of the box it would indeed make a nice leap.
As a developer Dan is definitely a genius, top 3 with Vitalik and Satoshi. However this is also his downfall as he thinks his ideas on everything else are at that level like an Elon Musk/Steve Jobs and that he is probably worth >25% equity of whatever project he is the lead developer of. Unfortunately his business, entrepreneurial and 'practical' economic skills are very poor imo. He would be a God with 5-10% equity on a project he committed too for 5 years+ while taking his development direction from a successful blockchain entrepreneur or even from the shareholders themselves.
In the case of Steem though he did seem to know it was designed for a major artificial CMC pump...
As the founder of Steem said...
Given that the economics don't stack up at all - It is essentially a pyramid scheme. (There's no revenue, just diluting speculators at a massive daily rate to fund generous user rewards and no realistic plan for future monetization of those users to cover those expenses and turn a profit.)
So I do wonder if they knew it was designed to pump then fail but generate a lot of money for them in the interim, (given they mined 80% of initial supply.)
Even now there's <0.3% of supply on the market, far less than any major altcoin and yet that amount still manages to dwarf the miniscule Steem buy support.