It seems to me that User Issued Tokens (assets, UIA) are very important for the development and growtht of a steem infrastructure.
Sooner or later, applications and clients based on Steem, in colaboration with Graphene, Eos, even sidechains will become very many.
But if they are from different segments, with different content policies, with different economies - it can be a conflict with the basic paradigm of the STEEM
Self tokens can solve this problem - anyone can easily create their own application based on Steem, and their own token will not break the economy of Steem, and even strengthen it!
I'm sure the "User Issued Tokens" is the next step towards the ideals of decentralization.