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RE: Latest Info on HF 17 (from GitHub) - Date Tentatively Set to Tue, 7 March 2017 16:00:00 UTC (11:00:00 EST)
A lot of these are probably beneficial.
However, I still believe that the most needed updates are ones for the UI. I can't tell you how annoying it is that our posts cannot use CSS. Let us not forget that Steemit is not only a cryptocurrency platform, it is also a blogging platform, and is competing with all other blogging platforms out there (Wordpress, Blogger, etc.). Comparatively, we're still in the stone age. And if we want the same level of adoption as these other blogging platforms, then we need to catch up.
From a development perspective, it makes sense to build the "engine" first and then worry about the UI parts later. If there are plans to continue tweaking the engine, and each time a tweak is made they have to update the UI - it is a lot of double work.
And if Steemit were a car, I would agree with you completely.
But Steemit is actually a piece of software. Now, many software developers deceive themselves into believing that what customers really want is a fine-tuned engine under the hood. It is one of their most common misconceptions. If this were true, we would all still be using Word Perfect as our word processor.
History has proven, again and again, that the only thing users care about is the interface, because it is the only part that the users actually interact with. And Steemit's #1 problem, lightyears ahead of all other problems at this moment, is that it is having problems attracting users.
By insisting that the underlying engine is a more pressing concern, you have fallen into the same trap that so many engineers have succumbed to over the years. Your concern is no doubt well intentioned, but it is divorced from reality.
If we were getting ready to officially launch tomorrow, I would completely agree with you. The site that we have today is not even close to something that is ready for mainstream. We need a "sexy UI" upgrade, with a lot more bells and whistles and improvements on the user experience.
The order that things are done is important though. The dev team has indicated that they have a lot of things that they plan to implement at the blockchain level, and it sounds like many of them are going to have dramatic changes to the user experience (like communities).
I am not arguing in favor of keeping the crappy UI. I am just saying that as a community of "beta testers" (which is what we all are) - that we should accept a limited UI for some time while they work on more of the important back-end features.