I don't think newsteem was just about getting the word about Steem out there, I agree we need more of that and it has been really difficult to find people interested in onboarding even with good incentives behind it. I do think newsteem should be about honest curation and one reason I do believe posts have gone down is because there is a shift happening where those who posted just to farm their guaranteed ROI from buying votes are stopping and the authors who never bought votes and are now receiving curation are starting to realize what is going on and that may take some more time for those to either come back or new ones to join and notice that it might be worth it to stick around as there's a lot more eyes on their posts. Yes, that is also hard to measure since comments are down a lot but it just means we need to go out of our way to onboard more people. The majority don't know about Steem and its advantages outside of the rewards, many we have onboarded lately have been really surprised that there aren't more users here cause even their first weeks have been awesome and they loved the community.
While OCD will focus on onboarding and retention in the near future part of it is also making sure with OCDB that stake does not go back to be used in oldsteem ways.
Also I know you were one of the main people who started the "newsteem" movement and I'm not trying to tell you what it is, just the way how I saw it be considering the EIP changes and what it means for Steem and a working content discovery and stake distribution moving forward after two years of vote selling and only a little altruistic curation.