Thank you for the suggestions! We'll definitely be looking into some custom design features when we launch communities, as we want people to be able to exercise a degree of visual control over them. This could pretty easily translate over into individual blog pages, too.

As for the other features, we're going to be focusing in the near term on things that directly relate to user engagement and retention, so some things like messaging are on the back-burner for a while. You can see the full list here:

https://steem.io/2017roadmap.pdf

Best,
-jp