I'm working in hardware wallet support through Ledger and making decent progress. A lot of your suggestions here would be best served as issues on the related GitHub repos so the discussion can be live and even encourage open source contributions.
No one expects everyone to be a coder, but with concerns like these if you keep them to yourself how can you expect them to ever be done?
Are you aware of the recent changes relating to AppBase that should modularize the individual Steem components and reduce the resource demand on witnesses and nodes?
Vessel is actively being developed with ideas in mind that would completely solve many of the issues you bring up. Maybe you would want to join the SteemDevs discord server and pitch some of your ideas to @jesta directly?
Otherwise great info in this post and many of your concerns are being actively worked on.
She's not exactly keeping her concerns to herself, but what you argue for is valid. Real effect is likely more achievable as issues on Github. Anyone reading this can also post to Github. A popular and highly rewarded post doesn't hurt for the argument though.