Good points!

The way I see it, I don't really think it's an exercise of democracy by Bobby Lee but rather a classic marketing ploy. Make people vote for a product and so they feel obligated to support it. In truth he has all the freedom in the world to release all trading pairs as he likes.. No one is stopping him as far as I know.

It's not to say it's all useless. After all. We can see now how strong we really are as a Steemit community and how powerful we can be when we unite and focus on our political will. People now know how numerous we are and how active is the Steem scene. So not all is lost.

However, there are many other pressing matters that we should be aware of internally. One of them I guess is the steemit platform itself. I don't complain but I definitely can see the things steemit.com can improved on. There are still some aches needed to be faced by mobile users (face it if ya ain't with it, mobile will be where the user influx floodgates be. Proof being the last few posts by me was mobile.) and I'm sure there are many many more things need to be ready to set the stage for a Mainstream break in.
But that's my 2 cents. Feels like it's been a few days since I made a comment worthy of the day. *hint hint ;P