Totally agree with your analysis.

I was actually surprised when, upon sharing my views with friends (admittedly of the "crypto geeky" strain) I only got disapproval ... "no, but decentralization, and censorship resistance and bla bla bla!" ("who the heck cares about that, outside of our closed circle!???")

The only difference is that I regretfully only joined steem in august 2017 instead of may 2016. And only started to look closely at it even later than that.