Being driven by the underlying financial technology infrastructure, Steem's developers focus towards this. But these other needs are valid and serve to help keep the crabs in the bucket, and picking up this habit that you get after a while, of seeing how you can use this in some new way profitably.

I am pretty sure that my idea of making PMs work with bitmessage will be what is chosen, it leverages an existing, quite large network, it is distributed, and by altering its operational parameters, the same mechanism can create a distributed chat system, that works on shorter timescales and smaller blocks of data.

Bitmessage is like a blockchain, except things intentionally disappear from it. All nodes keep any unexpired block in their cache, and send copies to everyone who hasn't already got a copy, just like a blockchain. It limits spam by requiring some cost in time and processing power to send a message. By reducing all these parameters I see no reason why such a system could not be interactive enough to be a chat platform. By adapting what is closest to hand to the purpose, you can benefit from existing infrastructure, as well as mutually benefiting that infrastructure by dramatically increasing the pool of nodes.

The bigger bitmessage gets, the harder it is to monitor its traffic patterns. Its data usage requirements are quite low in both storage and transmission. Maybe not everyone will run a witness node, but these nodes, they could run quite fine on a mobile device. By creating this faster instant messaging variant of Bitmessage, this can also be distributed, and support other network platforms as well, like XMPP is a common protocol currently for chat systems, other applications can link. There can be distributed name systems as well, creating memorable addresses, like email addresses. But linking them into Steem, you can make it easier for people to go to Steem... any app that works with Steem can message other Steem users, and building a bridge outside that bucket is also transparent. It could automatically recognise Steem usernames, but if you put a bitmessage address in, it can send it that way as well.

I think it's important that these things emerge, in order to support the gradual seamless linkage between all existing distributed network technologies, so it doesn't matter anymore, which thing you are part of, they can all integrate, eventually, and the servers that run will become more integrated. A modified small witness node could be devised, that caches past queries and acts as a proxy to get new queries, perhaps randomly selecting witnesses to draw from and multiple to verify consensus on the data.

The reason why I am so excited is because I can see how from this little humble base of Steem, you can glue everything else together.