I agree with all that you said. If I had not found the #needleworkmonday and #beersaturday communities, I would have left from boredom. And leveling here is tough. I will invest my time to post and interact to generate value but I won't buy Steem with real money, I am not a crypto-geek. I have no idea what half the cryptocoin postings mean and I am not here for that aspect.

I think of Steem as points towards rankings. I just this week got to 100 and that means that I am 1/5 of the way to the next rank/level. The nice thing about the level system is that once I accumulate enough value, I can reward other players for good posts with more than just a meaningless upvote.
Right now... you are thinking... Jamethiel- you have completely misunderstood the whole website! But have I? Or am I looking at it from a non-crypto point of view?

It took me forever to figure out the power up stuff and I have to use steemworld to find mentions and basic information about my account since Steemit is so crypto focused that the developers don't seem to understand the simplest needs of their potential customers.

And no, I haven't bothered trying any of the dozen alternative interfaces- again, not a crypto geek and the options are hard to identify. Plus they didn't always look very secure. And I would need a lot more time in order to even try to identify an actual user friendly interface.

There is a significant difference between the power users here and the casual users and the deadfish. If the interactions you hoped for did not happen, why stay and play?

And Steem is interesting but too hard for most people to "get" the basics and get started if they don't join a community and engage with similarly minded folks pretty early on.

I feel lucky that I found communities that were interesting to participate in. Without them, the site is simply too hard to get noticed on and it is a struggle for new users to break past the lower levels.