Just saw this on youtube and followed you to comment here. Too late for me to upvote, but great post and vid.

Yeah, I think it is a major development. May take some time to really work its way through the ecosystem, but at least that can begin now.

Only drawback, of course, is that we know that without investing in STEEM there is a lot of turnover among new users. So attracting a bunch of new users by the dollar signs next to the comments may just lead them down a tech-heavy rabbit hole that proves to offer little financial reward for the time invested. Unless they also invest money, which not many people will.

If steempress develops their own SMT that subsidizes some of the RC costs for those who sign up on their clients' WP websites, this may improve somewhat. But in general, the steemit model is pretty "the more you have, the more you get."