It would be so much simpler if dApps and businesses demanded STEEM to have their product on-chain and then could reward that in tokens that they themselves need to sustain the value of, rather than just printing STEEM and hope that somehow it attracts more value than it dilutes (it doesn't).

Tribes and communities/SMTs are one way of doing it, but honestly you could do it with just liquid STEEM too with a model somewhat similar to what drugwars did except that one has a sustainable revenue model for bringing in STEEM that grows with the userbase (selling ad space for STEEM, letting people buy unique pro-features, etc, etc) which becomes the reward pool.

At least I've been trying to share the idea that what actually works on Steem can be done (imo better) without inflation-dervied rewards (communities should be able to distribute rewards however they like, but they should have to sustain its value themselves).

Honestly, this would not only remove the biggest value-leak in Steem. And the biggest turn-off point for investors (hign inflation going to rather meaningless things). It would also improve the actual social media and content discovery part, as people could finally vote more "normal" instead of based on what they hope will result in rewards. Looking back at the last 3 years and how much time was spent by clever people figuring out how to min max their returns from inflation through bots, rather than building attractive products... The time spent by author sucking up to whales rather than sharing their content and Steem externally to create a network effect. To me, this is perhaps the main issue with the stake-based reard model, that it only incentivizes people to share to those who know the most about Steem, rather than to those who have not yet heard iof it. This is how any other blog or social media has grown in the past, users doing the marketing and onboarding other users themselves.