The maintenance is exactly which re-valued the posts. The quantity of posts while the system was in "read only mode", means there were a lot less posts that particular day.

Which simply means, there is enough steem created each day to handle this quantity of posts.

I would expect a good post would be worth no more than $100, and there should be a lot more "sharing" of the daily steem dollars among all the top posts.

Eventually we'll hit that plateau. For now, yes, we see crazy numbers, even on the days where there is no maintenance.