As a proud user of chainbb, i completely understand your point of view. In general, im curious to see what path steemit will follow, is it going to be a forum type, where people will 'have' to read the post ? One good thing is that it would direct the user towards reading a post and then upvoting it, which would ensure (at least on a higher level) that the content is good (and not for example just selfie pictures).
However, it could also take a complete facebook/instagram path, where random voting could cause a flood. Now, if everyone gets paid , even without decent content or without reading, it should be fine 'in theory', but im a little sceptical how this can be kept in the future.
P.S
the other steem clients, i assume thy have different developers? Or the same ones but have different functionalities?
For the most part, all of the different steem clients are written by different groups of people. Between Steemit, eSteem, Busy and chainBB - I don't think there's much overlap. We all do use common libraries and share bits of code though :)