I couldn't agree with you more.

For example many people would agree that the trending page is broken and often shows posts that were artificially brought to the top through upvotes bots.
Yet, some topic areas seem to be working much better in my opinion. For example I do check the steemstem trending page every now and then and my impression is that more often than not the featured posts deserve to be there. Of course there are exceptions but it is a very subjective matter.

With regards to the signing process I look forward to near instant entry for newcomers.
But in my opinion the biggest challenge is the use of so many secret keys that are impossible to remember. How are regular web users supposed to know how to use and never lose them? People lose passwords, that's a fact of life. Until using the blochain becomes as easy as using Facebook the steem community faces a serious challenge to expand.

It's already bad enough to have to copy and paste a long secret key in a browser on a desktop OS, but how do we expect people to let login to steem on their mobile? This is such a big problem for steem app developers.
This requires a thinking group to come with a realistic solution. In my mind everything else is almost secondary.