It's easy to forget steemit is just a VIEW of the blockchain. Busy.org, eSteem, SteemDB, ChainBB, and soon Zappl all are other views of the same blockchain. It is more than just the steemit website. Steemit can be slow due to it being just a website and various factors there and you can jump over to busy.org during that time and view the same posts at lightning fast speed. At other times busy may be slow and steemit is rocking it. Steemdb is more for technical information and wouldn't be much fun for casual browsing and use. So what I am getting at is that the steem blockchain is lightning fast. Whichever websites we use can be slow or laggy at a given time, but steem itself is still going a million miles an hour in the background.

This is also an advantage. All of this functionality of the blockchain is not dependent upon steemit. Any number of applications can be built to take advantage of it. So even those competing. They are trying to compete with one website, which is like picking on TV manufacturer to compete with when the amount of TV manufacturers and devices that interact with the blockchain in different ways is potentially infinite.

I describe the blockchain to my children as the file system, or their hard drives. Steemit is just one of the programs they use to open files on that file system. They can use others if they want and it might give other features, show different data, etc.

It is truly an astonishing project and the competitors are not even in the same game. They are playing checkers when we are playing three dimensional chess.