Wow Nail on the head....
I have been on the Steem Block Chain for a year and 9 months ago, I did the following cartoon...

If there is bondo which makes the paint job bubble on a car.
You can bet there is rust on the under chassis.

But I will say that @Ned is a young guy and it is obvious to me he has been learning on the Job, but leadership and management is a very different set tools then are needed for the marketing/ sales, and for innovation and development. And thruth be told it takes more than 2 years to know how to run a business with a million accounts and 100s of thousands of Users.

That's why most businesses (which SteemIt is) bring in different CEOs as it transitions to different sizes. Ned still should be a founder and beacon to bring people to the block chain, sitting on the Board of Directors, but he should bring a seasoned gray beard in who has dealt with transitioning technologies to Open Source Community building. That's what DEC did with Netscape / Mozilla. At&T did with Unix through bell labs...

All I know is that, it really all comes down to does @ned want to Steem to be around in 2 years or 30? Because I can tell you, with out knowing any of the specific politics and technologies out there,

Within 2 years there will be a blockchain that will be able to cheaply duplicate the the historical information on the Steem Blockchain and through compatibility mode run a virtual node that mimic's the actions of steem apps and api's. Making SteemIt Inc. virtually worthless unless they have further innovations which can only come from a large vibrant Open Source Development community.

After all everything on Steemit is on the wayback machine already....