Nice to see you @carlgnash; thanks for the pretty accurate summary.
Reading between the lines of a LOT of posts, I seem more and more of a subtext emerge that Steemit is awesome for developers, not so much for content creators. Steemit is a bit like someone building a bigger and bigger apartment building with more and more rooms, adding more and more rec room features, but not actually doing anything to see whether the teneants are happy... let alone GETTING tenants. "But it's awesome if you're in the construction business!"
I don't think STINC much cares about this as a platform for content. They have visions of sugarplums... ehrmm... SMT dollar signs dancing in their eyes and everything else has become pretty secondary; tertiary, even.
As a fellow curator and content "consumer" I agree that this place totally ROTS. I can only keep up with my favorite people because I have my own set of bookmark folders (that have NOTHING to do with Steemit) to check on them-- manually. At the very LEAST, I wish we had the ability to sort followers into "groups" like you can on Facebook and Twitter. The content itself? "Discovering" content is always an adventure... mostly, I find it via "intelligent" comments on the posts of people I already read. Alas, that doesn't give newcomers much of a chance... although I occasionally force myself to refresh the #introduceyourself feed for an hour or two.
Interesting you say that RE finding people through comments - that has become one of my primary curation strategies (I am a top curator for @curie). Finding clusters of "good people" amidst the sea of spam and just plain old crap posting. As soon as I see an intelligent commenter I check out their blog and more importantly look at their feed - real people tend to follow real people who resteem good posts. But it takes a lot of work. I also use SQL query (and paid subscription to @arcange's SteemSQL database) to curate and keep up with favorite posters and that is very efficient, but costs me 10 SBD a month.
BTW if you haven't already, check out @thefreshfive . It is a dailycuration effort focused on the #introduceyourself tag, bringing you 5 recently introduced Steemians daily. I know the folks behind this effort and they are awesome, and I support it with upvotes for the daily posting and upvotes for the featured newcomers with my @r-bot curation account. It is an easy way to bring a steady stream of newcomers into your awareness without any effort :) LOL Much love - Carl