I get what you are talking about. However, I think that there is a tendency to pronounce the death of Steemit over this issue or that without giving the development team time to work through the issues and bring new stuff online.
The site has been up since May. It's not like they have a template for what they are doing, thus the reason it remains in beta. Since the articles are not being removed after 30 days and are findable by Google and other search engines then they can serve as a way to bring people not only to the site but also to you.
Making sure there is a link to your profile clearly displayed in a post will help bring people to your recent posts which can be upvoted. At this stage of the site, I rarely find any of my posts being upvoted after a few days. So, not being able to upvote after 30 days is not yet a big issue. In time it may be.
I totally understand that it's in beta and they're overwhelmed, been there countless times.
But, on the other hand, I think this is probably the most important user retention bottleneck. It draws authors away and, without authors, curators don't have much to do.
Like I said, it's a huge opportunity cost: the traction that gets Steemit now and the increasing quality of the content would be lost very soon and it would be a pity. That very visibility of the project, in the case of a massive defection of users and a possible implosion of Steemit, will cast a veil of negativity over the entire niche, reducing it to the old "spammy ponzi tipping site".
I think you and I will need to agree to sort of disagree. I see it as a problem, but not a life threatening issue.
We can safely agree to disagree on this one, no problem. Different people, different expectations, just one world to share. It's ok :)