I read your post, too.
I think it would be important to develop the front end. It works now but Facebook's is completely superior in every way. They've had massive amounts of money to throw at it for a long time, though.
Marketing and reward distribution are other things that deserve a serious look. With a more equitable reward distribution, it could be easier to get more people on board and keep more of the people who join.
Also, developing easy to use basic financial services on top of the blockchain is another important area. Smart contracts? I know of only three people in my city (Lahti, Southern Finland, 118,000 inhabitants) who have ever had a Steem account. At least a third of the population has Facebook accounts. As a way to pay for coffee, forget about Bitcoin and nearly any other cryptocurrency. But STEEM could work perfectly. After a critical threshold of user density in a local area, STEEM could well function as a payment system in stores or between individuals. Would it make practical sense for a large group of users in some densely populated locality to create community like this? If if worked, it could attract media attention.
Yea, those are some good ideas. Steem does have a lot of work to do to. We need to do funding projects so that we can support developers in improving the platform.