That's a good summary from Sg. Even if you're doing it right, you don't always (or even often) get rewarded. If I were trying to approach fly fishing for steelhead these days, I think I would start by picking a piece of water that you know holds fish (or at least did when you were getting them on gear) and is no deeper than 6 feet. Sure, you CAN catch steelhead on flies in 10+ feet of water, but you'll generally have much better odds shallower than 6 feet, mostly because it's hard to get flies down deeper than that, but also because deeper water tends to fish "fly" patterns poorly. Leave that deep stuff for the gear fishing days and focus your effort on flat runs and the inside edges of riffles.

As regards presentation, upstream nymphing can work, but most often, you will get bit as the fly gets to fish holding depth, which is tough to accomplish long before the drift is even with your standing position. Indeed, most of your takes, no matter how you're fishing, will happen even with or downstream of your standing position.

Cool thing about summer runs is that they are more easily convinced to come up for stuff at or near the surface than winters. That makes for classic conditions for deep swinging or greased lining flies. You don't necessarily have to be "down," but your presentation needs to look like what(ever) they want to draw strikes.

To answer your question, I still fish for steelhead, but only a little. If I had more water open closer to home, I would fish a lot more. Catching matters a lot less to me than just being out there. I would give up a lot just for an opportunity to get skunked on one of my old, favorite haunts. Good luck out there.