I bookmarked this one as per your suggestion @ebryans, and today found time to actually read.

I agree with many of the basics, you articulated in your post, of what Steemit shall be about. If it is a money thing, than it will fail. The funds made available each day will not pay for the hours spend on creating appealing content, for sure not when we will have 100s of thousands to millions of active bloggers.

Steemit shall be something else indeed!

Regarding your suggestions what and how to change things, I have not an opinion since I cannot foresee the consequences of it. On top of your ideas, I can throw many other ideas how to actually generate more funds, wether that be through Steem value increase against FIAT currencies, or the ability to generate more Steem every day, or a combination of both.

I actually think that we (while we are still in beta) will have to test quite a few different models. Those models that we can test by procedure, lets agree and execute those ASAP. Those that require code changes, lets list them and priorities for development.

We need a better way of bringing the various ideas of our community members together. We need a better way to inform the community on what is technical possible, and what is not (today) and what the consequences are when changing the models and code.

For instance: to allow only 1 individual to have 1 account, somehow the real identity of the individual is required to be mapped to the Steemit virtual identity. Although @timcliff and @abit generally state this is not possible (they are right in the sense that how Steemit/Steem is developed today it cannot be done), I think it is possible, whether that be something build internal into Steemit/Steem, or use some external 3rd party company/service for the identity establishment and verifications. The consequence is that we cannot be 100% anonymous anymore, or at least not in the chain, meaning we can still be anonymous here on Steemit, but somewhere there is a mapping between virtual identities and real identities. Knowing that, we first need to agree as a community if we find such consequence acceptable and secondly if we find such consequence more or less important to an one account per one individual requirement. Maybe we don't need this to make Steemit a success, may we do need it to not allow Steemit to die; Who knows at this stage? Fact for me is: We need structured idea exchange; We need solid discussions on how to progress Steemit; We need to find models and solutions to test; We need to agree on what we test; We need to agree on what to implement etc. Hence we need a less chaotic way of communication through numerous posts and comments here on Steemit now (some posts and comments are read, some others are not because thse users are not visible); We need a more structured approach supported by tools here on Steemit (or outside Steemit, but I prefer within Steemit) which requires (some) UI (and maybe some backend) development. Unfortunately I'm not technical enough to really understand the work and time required, but I'm technical enough to understand when some engineer explains me.

I'll be more than happy to contribute to such more structured way of evolving Steemit.