People are only coming out of the woodworks because crypto is coming back to life :P!

STEEM is surviving more than thriving at this point in time but pretty soon it will pick up more momentum. As far as interaction on the platform I had really become jaded after YEARS of waiting around for things to change. Finally they have implemented some new stuff for the site and moved out of beta... which took entirely too long. That 2 year period of slow and half-assed developments from SteemitInc really set the community back when we should have had a new User Interface a long time ago.

We still have a very long way to go but I would say that things are progressing faster than expected this year.