Glad to see you around. Interesting points, the site seems to be much better.
Regarding the private chat features, I think the current user-base has acclimated to SteemIt.chat and discord and such. It will likely take new user activity to kick off much use of the feature.
I agree. New users will find it and chat between votes or while browsing their feed. I need to get back on discord and see if I can get onto the new version of busy.org -it stopped working on my every day machine which has layers of template OS versions and VM's that run from there (translation: updates are a huge pain)
The chat idea is cool😎. I move around on discordapp and steemit chat to talk with my steemain friends i have met here in steemit.