That was my first reaction, too, but I eventually teased a bit of meaning out of it.

If you have to tease meaning out of a thing, it doesn't have meaning. If you have to tease meaning out of what should be a clear, concise, and well-polished corporate statement of intent, it definitely doesn't have meaning.

You might be engaged in projection, or you might be engaged in whshcasting, but it can't be in deriving meaning from words.

We all need to be better about separating those things, especially in the face of that which people ostensibly care about and which affect their lives. None of these should be hard questions. They should have straightforward answers.

I do think this for Steem is focused on a specific type of human-engaging content, rather than quite the generic function of any chain. Since there are some big differences that benefit from specialization, this strikes me as a real thing.

You can think that, but that doesn't make it true. Steem transactions allow for a chunk of metadata which can be interpreted by client front ends aware of the structure of that metadata – but that's no different from any other blockchain in a very literal and specific way. The only thing that separates steem at this point is an implementation that makes use of that metadata for the rough implementation of a low-feature social media platform. But that could trivially change tomorrow and arguably has already changed pretty aggressively with both Whaleshares and Minds making use of crypto-commodity technology.

This much seems pretty spot-on, though. To be fair, ETH does this pretty badly, so it's hard to blame someone for seeing an opportunity to do better. Though we've already seen one Graphene-based attempt to surpass it with unencouraging results.

I'm definitely not sure that it is fair to say that Ethereum does "this" pretty badly, when Ethereum supports a ridiculous number of E20 sub-tokens which are in active, actual exchange and has been for quite a while.

What is it that Steemit Inc. wants to do that Ethereum isn't already? You'd think that would be an easy question to answer.