Interesting thoughts. I'm one of those who makes posts only for steem. I hear it's easy to cross post, so I wonder why everyone just doesn't do that.
From my perspective, if we want more people to use steem, we need to make it appeal to a less elite class of folks. As it is now a user has to be tech savvy, discord savvy, publishing savvy, have a taste for gambling, and have a lot of time to figure out the arcane structure of the rewards system here.