Interesting thoughts as always @exyle. Whereas you may be entirely right about the future, there's always ONE question mark that always stays for me:
There's never any talk about "end users" and who they are. I'm personally a "marketing guy" not a developer, and if you don't put effort and attention to who's going to use all these apps, it doesn't matter how great they are. It's almost like there are apps to organize the apps that organize the apps and layers of SMTs to tokenize all of them.
In the end, are we looking at a future of Steem that's only wholesale/reselling, not an end user product?
Just curious.
For me it's not up to Steem inc to put effort and attention into who is going to use those apps. For me, their key roll is providing the app makers with all the tools they need to do that themselves.
Not being able to sign up your own users is one of the things that is holding everything back. The process is not friction free, it's not a nice first experience. It will be addressed in HF20. I think it's a hugely important update.
Second is of course SMT's. The reward model of STEEM is great but also has it flaws. Being able to come up with your own reward model and a ton of other parameters to reward and incentive users to use your product is fantastic.
Those two combined alone will bring the Steem blockchain to the next level and it's all powered by steem.