Already got way too many projects running right now, so I'm not sure how much I'd be able to help, but I'd love to hear more about your idea. Unless you're already familiar with Steem development I could at least tell you if what you're thinking of would work the way you imagine it since I've already developed and published two Steem apps.
While I'm by no means an expert, due to my work on those apps I do know in general what is and isn't possible and how to do it. You can reach me best via email, cryptowyrm at protonmail.ch, haven't used chat apps in years, took up way too much of my time and I'm self employed so I need to be the one who tells me to not be lazy on the job :)
Not talking about apps as much as just as different method of publishing within steemit. And I totally get what you're saying, if you want to be your own boss, you have to boss yourself.
If it works with Steem as is that's even better of course. One of the things I want to do when I find the time is making an app for writing fiction collaboratively on Steem. Everyone would write a small part of a story, and then people can upvote those they like and the part with the highest reward is added to the story and then a new round of writing and voting begins. I wrote a website like that about 20 years ago, was really fun.
One problem is that when the story gets too long and too popular, the amount of time needed to read through everything to participate becomes crazy, but since you would get money for the upvotes on story parts you write, that might incentivize more people to do it and put some real effort into it to raise the quality.
Might even result in a complete novel that could be self-published and then the rewards split between everyone whose content ended up in the book, that's been done before, I remember reading that in the news a long time ago.
Well, that's not too hard. Steemplus allows for the rewards to be split automatically. So, publish the first part, then allow people to drop links in the comments, tell the readers to upvote the comment link they like. Then, just build a growing repository of links to find the rest of the story. Not perfect, but it would work, and get a lot of people interested.