Excelent post. It covers a lot of the issues and misconceptions with steem that people have quite concisely. I have booked marked it to use when I see people going though the existential crisis that comes after the first couple of months on the platform.

I wrote a response last night to @therealwolf to his question about why are people still here? (https://steempeak.com/steem/@therealwolf/why-are-you-still-on-steem). I think it is relevant to some of the issues you raise so I am going to post it again here

I have been here since last December so not quite a year. Steem is down 90% in that time. I am still here as a content creator ( a photographer ) ; because all of the centralised social media outlets are slowly clamping down on post reach. I spent literally years building a following of 80k + people in social media only to watch the reach whittled away by algorithmic restrictions which required one to pay to promote to your own followers. The real breakthrough here is not the potential for rewards (which are nice) but the concept that the users control their own network (following) on the blockchain. No one can come along and simply demand money and take the network away from you until you pay.

The people complaining about how hard it is to get ahead here have never seen how impossibly hard it is to make a living from a small influencer dividend on traditional social media .

Sure trending is broken and content discovery is abysmal but these are fixable problems . All the social media blockchain clones will have to deal with the same set of problems when designing their platforms. And getting new tokens onto exchanges will only become harder as established players croud the maket. Steem has learnt some hard lessons in the past two years ; and tweaking social financial algorimithic systems is almost as difficult as running a counties finances . Small changes have large impacts . The direction we are heading however is the right one. SMTs will drive a dependency on the steem blockchains sucess in a way most don’t appreciate. It is the people and their companies which ultimately bail out the banks in a financial crisis . The too big to fail model. In the same way it will be the DApps which will ultimately ensure steem does not fail as they depend on it for their business model.

Anyway I am still here posting my work ; even if less people look at it than I would hope. Because if I have learnt anything in social media over the years it is that success is a result of consistency over long periods of time (assuming you have something worth sharing in the first place !).