Hi @happycapital, having been looking at this precise dynamic for a long time now, there are a few things that are a little bit strange about the price feeds.

If I'm not mistaken, when everything is working, the price feed used to reflect rewards is supposed to be the average indication by the top 20 witnesses, calculated as the mean of the past five days. So if Steem shoots up for just ONE day, it doesn't get reflected till several days later.

But crunching the numbers suggests that not everything is working quite as intended. The actual number you see next to the number of votes actually includes the TRX value you will earn, as well... so when the post actually pays out the Steem/SP portion is less than you would think. Of course, I'm not convinced the code has been adjusted to reflect the most recent update in which the Tron Foundation now only rewards 25% of the Steem value, as TRX... I think it's still set to 1-for-1. So that skews the figures, as well.

Finally — and I'm not 100% sure on this — whereas the witness price feeds are correctly used to calculate rewards at the moment of payout, I'm not convinced that the dynamic price feed used in the code is working properly anymore; I think it has been stuck at a fixed rate that actually has been overstating earnings for a while, while the price of Steem has been in this bear market. The reason I say this is that some of the folks who do "Daily Steem Price Updates" have been displaying the same price for a really long time, even though we know the market price fluctuates.

It would be nice if @steemitblog could come back with a comment from someone who actually knows what's happening; or maybe we could hear from @justyy, @steemchiller, @dev.supporters or one of the other witnesses?

If the bear market truly is about to come to an end, it would be important to have "the house in order" for a potential inflow of new users!