You pointed out some very important aspects about branding and marketing midlet!

I'd like to say something about this:

It's really hard to brand and market a platform. Think about it like this, when was the last time you saw an ad for iOS? You've probably never seen one. You've seen ads for iPhones, iPads, iPods, or applications built on iOS. You see ads for the PRODUCTS built on the platform. The platform itself is so generic and general purpose that it's hard to create a compelling "story" around it.

You focused your post mainly about onboarding the masses. That's one way to look at things, and you covered it very well.

But Steem can be pitched to businesses or to investors directly. For them, a different message makes sense. And I'm sure iOS was pitched to Apple partners at first. It doesn't have to be a public marketing campaign.

I believe in these cases private approaches work better. And for that there's need of people from the same category with whom the pitch is being made to. Investors and business owners involved in Steem who can approach their peers. Developers as well to other developers. They have the authority to talk to their peers about these topics. Everyone else is cheering, including myself.