Great points. The current metrics used to measure blockchain value are extremely flawed.

People thought transaction volume was critically important because of Bitcoin's scaling issues. Now exchanges are faking their volume and so are DPOS chains because it's free to do so. Now the metric means nothing. There is no way to measure "quality" volume over the white noise.

People think market cap matters, yet any coin could 10x at any moment. Does that mean the project just got ten times better on a fundamental level? No.

People have the urge to oversimplify complicated spaces in an attempt to understand and tame them. The problem is that this technology will not be tamed. It is permissionless. The best devs out there don't care about price action at all.

Steem will be a great success if only because it is slightly less complicated than other chains.

Which one is going to look more terrifying to new users:

Send 1000 Steem to @edicted.
Send 0.1 BTC to 1BvBMSEYstWetqTFn5Au4m4GFg7xJaNVN2

"Don't forget, if you send your money to the wrong place you lose everything."

In addition, when people find out they only have to wait 3 seconds instead of 10 minutes... This is a big deal because people freak out during that ten minutes where it looks like their money has disappeared. Zero fees means people can break a transaction up into pieces without feeling like they are wasting money on block producers.

Compound this with the fact that Steem is much harder to steal and we have decentralized account recovery and it's easy to see that we really have something special on a fundamental level. The "paid to ____" feature is really just icing on the cake at this point.