I posit it would end up being a great place to have Steem related discussions while the rest stay more reserved for content relevant to the general public.

What's wrong with using the steem tag? Now that we have free downvotes, it is far more feasible to start to police tag abuse. Hopefully we will get to a point where rampant vote selling has been dealt with and we can perhaps move on to using more downvotes for things like tag abuse.

I don't think that all Steem-related topics need to be burn posts, but I'm not against it either.

On the matter of not being able to downvote null/burn payouts, I don't generally support that, I think stakeholders should be able to do so if they think too much is being burnt (and if it turns out there is consistent consensus for a significant amount of consistent burning, a fork can reduce inflation). But I think UIs deciding to differentiate in various ways is perfectly fine. Some ideas will turn out to be popular with users and some won't.