Interesting questions @kubbyelizabeth!
First let me explain that I am proposing for a witness, a general one, not for a specific community. It happens that I am Portuguese and I speak portuguese language, so I would like to use that ability in favor of growing the Steemit community to the Portuguese speaking people of Portugal, Brazil and African countries by helping to remove the language barrier. But I have much more projects, not Portuguese language related, like continuing improving DSound platform and marketing it on the music industry, bringing musicians from all over the world into Steemit, or developing other decentralized apps on the Steem blockchain directed to other niches, that I cannot reveal at the moment, but believe me that ideas don't lack in my head... :)
Now to your questions.
It's a fact that I registered my account on Steemit on July 9th of 2017. So, in only five months short of one week, I managed to develop one of top decentralized apps on Steem blockchain, without asking for any official support or rewards beforehand. I managed to build solid relationships with many Steemians online and in real life on SteemFest, not only techy guys, but also people from other orientations and philosophical views. I would reply to such a question, probably with another question: why not? Why not give the benefit of doubt to me since I already gave so much without asking for anything in return, besides now for this witness vote application? For me Steem was a love at first sight, as I said on my speech at SteemFest. I love the idea behind it, it's values and what can be achieved pushing it to a major scale. Why not letting me in? :)
As for a long term vision for Steemit, it's a very difficult question. I think the values of Steem as gift economy, a special one where one can give without losing their share, can be applied to so many things... I am curious about the Communities and how we can use them to build even more robust manageable content subdivisions, in a way that for instance people that like photography will not be flood with all the music posts of musicians that like photography as well. I am also curious about SMT's and their impact on Steem economy. I am thinking of using them to create a different economy structure for DSound, possibly removing beneficiary rewards from the equation and making it a more fair market, as I didn't like them in the first place, but had no other choice for monetization of the platform to try to make it sustainable. In general, my vision for Steemit is the moon, I think that we are only in the beginning of something that we cannot even have the right dimensions of... But one thing I have certain: I wanna be part of it!
The most alarming topic discussed, well that depends... There are a lot of topics that need discussion in a fair and honest way, egos and powers aside. One of the biggest ones for me is the onboarding of new users. And I'm not talking only about the account creation, as this has been discussed hundreds of times and is a known barrier to Steemit expansion, but most of all the way we market Steemit outside and the reality that the new users experience are two different things! On one side, I see a lot of people marketing this community as: "Post your blog. Earn. Is that simple.", or "blog. vote. post. earn.", or even "How my first post on Steemit made $15000." This is giving false expectations for new users. I invite every single soul I happen to feel any kind of connection with to join, and I have been told countless times that they post, and post and post and they cannot make anything more than $0.01 - $0.05... I think that we are advertising the wrong way! We are spreading that Steemit is just blog and start paying your bills out of it, but what we want our new community members to do is to share their works, interact with the fellow members, build solid relationships and only then the rewards will start to materialize. So the rewards should be a consequence and not an objective! Maybe we should change the way we market Steemit to something like: Blog. Participate. Build relationships. Share what you love. And if you make $0.01 out of it, you already got $0.01 more than your entire lifetime on other platforms... And if you're awesome, then the sky is the limit! :)
I hope that I answered all your questions in enough detail, but feel free to ask more if I didn't...
Thank you for having invited me to MSP, I am enjoying it a lot!
;)