It's hard to reward people if your token has no value, and despite the current fall of the STEEM price, the token is still rank #15 in terms of Market Cap. If you create you own token you will not likely get anywhere near that value (ask the 690 tokens below Steem) and therefore will not be able to distribute meaningful rewards.

I think you are missing my logic. The app developers are already working and Steemit itself is still actively in development. I think our turning point will be the roll out of communities which is what will bring order to the current stream of posts (subreddits were a crucial part of Reddit's success). The increased popularity/adoption will be driven by platform/apps improvements, I may have lead you to believe that it would magically appear (poor writing skills ... I'm an engineer).

I do believe the balancing needs some tweaking in the rewards/influence curves, but these are refinements, not a change of the current system.