You're absolutely right!
You bring up a whole lot of subjects where you are right on all of them.
You can do crypto easy, keep some coins in a easy to use app. Exodus is such an app. It does not hold steem, but it is better held in your account as steem power (again bringing up the difficulty level). Download it at exodus.io and see if it suits you. It is intimidating but cleverly guiding you through the security measures. For some it is too much, to me it was an eye opener.
The difficult part comes next. How to fill it up. And here comes a wide range of choices that spans from buying them, mining them or trading them after your taste. All this is intimidating and the traps many. Yes, even scams are out there.
Back to steemit. It is actually a very good and complete offering. It has steem, the influence and more speculative asset that gives you influence when locked up in sp. and steem dollars that are meant to be price stable. Since I believe in growth of steem, it is natural to spend sbd. I spend it on steem, other currencies which involves exchanges and transferring... ugh intimidating. So the internal exchange, where you can convert sbd to steem an vice versa is a solid first step.
Try. Start moving some sbd to steem. Power up. Do it again. Try out some software on your desktop and see how other currencies could compliment. And when you come to a conclusion if you want to spend time on it or not, you have at least learned how to get pretty much out of your steemit. For some, that's enough. For the rest of us, moving around, trading, mining is just something we do. It's fun. Exciting. And for some a job.
But it is still way too complicated. And I emphasize still. A few years and it will be much more accessible.