It's the first of it's kind so there are going to be lots of hiccups along the way. I think there is a lot going on behind the scenes that we are unaware of. The wheels are in motion and like you said, it is the most widely used blockchain, the transactions are instant and it's one of the worlds most visited sites.
Getting all the intricacies worked out takes time but we are in a good place, (you a little better than me) and we just need to keep finding/creating/curating good content.
Even just holding steem on the platform gives a better ROI than most other coins on the market.
No coin comes close to Steem at the moment. Good job from @dan and @ned. Clearly there will be many competitors out in the future so we can just surf the wave from our learning experience on Steemit where we are all Beta testers. Can we create an utopia that's the question.