Yeah, so the primary thing of concern seems to be how much the consensus technology (seems like a good term) can allow for different groups of people to meet their needs - the political aspect you talk about. One size does not fit all, so people have to be able to create their own rules and arrangements to suit their own needs. As you say, smart contracts allow for this since only people who opt into the smart contract are using it (i.e. we assume everyone else is pretty much unaffected, or they are affected (everything is connected to everything else from a systems science perspective) but to such an indirect and low extent that it's acceptable).
In the case of Steem, it seems that SMTs + Communities would allow for quite a lot of this - different groups making up their own rules without interfering with the other groups. It seems to me like the Steem base layer is allowing for lots of such cultural evolution.
What you say about inter-blockchain trustless transfers also seems quite interesting and I wonder how much it can be implemented with TRON and Steem. Any thoughts?
With regards to the evolution of design, I guess my overall point was that the Steem community can make progressive hardforks, as it has done many times, but the community remains as a single whole. There doesn't have to be a split in the community since the entire community accepts the evolution. It seems that this evolution of the base layer through hardforks is about smart ways of increasing flexibility so as to allow for cultural evolution to happen and groups to come up with their own tailor-made cultural rules.