A very interesting post and discussion. I share some of the concerns you brought up, but I see things a little differently.

I joined Steemit in September and back then it had about 100,000 members and the value of steem was about $0.5 . Since then the value of Steem has quite constantly went down to the current ~$0.1 , but much more revealing, is that, based on SteemWhales the number of users went down to around 62,000.

Now, since @dan and @ned are running a business here, I am pretty sure that this is not how they want things to continue. Also remember that this is still a beta phase. So what I am courios and concerned about, is what are they going to do, because it is really up to them if Kim Cardeshian will join or not. Although I have some ideas about how to make Steemit better, I think the main issue here is were do the founders want to take this.