Direct messages will be probably added in the future, I saw today that there's developed Steemit Messenger, but it's still in beta version. You can see it here https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@therealwolf/introducing-steem-messenger-beta
Also, one bad thing which I noticed is that they canceled view counter at the end of the text, so we can't have statistics of our content :)
Agree. View counter was nice.
But I have read, that it's because it showed incorrect data, so maybe thay will work on it in future and bring it back