He careful phrases that it is a competitor to steemit, which would then primarily do development, and not the underlying blockchain steem. I am quite sure this will be another frontend and in fact steemit.com is not very good. But as far as I can tell from the statement it never says that it would be based on something else than steem.

And there are a lot of things that could be improved, with concepts that maybe work offchain such as direct chats with end to end encryption, and much more.