These are excellent questions. Questions we all should be asking. As steemians we are investing our time and energy into the system it would be nice to know what the game plan is for the future.
You are concerned about the value of STEEM currency petering out after cryptos go mainstream and the hype keeping many (if not most) of the Altcoins afloat will fail. I beleive that compared to most coins out there some of which are blantaly built upon false premises to lure in the Crypto Happy investors, that STEEM actually has potential to rise up with the big players.
I have seen other monetized social platforms. Steemit is head over heals ahead of the rest when it comes to value and integrity. The spam bots are a little annoying and as a democratic society we must do our part to downvote these. This is what the power of blockchain technology is based upon. The power of the masses striving towards fairness, goodness and equality.
As for monetizing, a solution may be creating functionality the same as Oyster Pearl (PRL ) every user of the site agrees to give a little hash power to the crypto in exchange for ad free use. They advertise "Revenue in one Line of Code" https://oysterprotocol.com/
Steemit.com has excellent SEO. It is how I happened upon the site in the first place. This combined with a revenue per usage model has the potential make us great(er).
Oh I absolutely think STEEM has value after all of the hype is dead. DTube as a good alternative for YouTube especially. I think Steemit is here to stay, if we can get the social aspect (comments, conversation, etc.) To be site wide, not just as an effort to get the attention of whales. That's the reason I like to browse the New section rather than trending. Great place to start good conversations about interesting topics.
First I've heard of oyster chain, that's a pretty cool concept. I'm still trying to wrap my head around the way the blockchain theoretically changes economics. It looks like it could be so different from the way business has traditionally operated on the web. Real excited to see how it all plays out.
It changes economics on such a big mind blowing scale it is almost unfathomable. Once you become familiar with the concept of the valuation of "smart contracts", the query will not be how to get your head around how it all works but how to get your head around the fact that ecomomics as we know it will be left in the dust.