Wishing you techie wizards the very best with the Steem scalability solutions, because if mass adoption of Steem is to come and over-spill into every day world transactions, and be truly disruptive, as so many hope for, we will need this fundamental development to carry us forward and bear the weight!
So... it's more important to see this focus, than a lot of the vapid opinion about the nature and design of steemit itself, which has surely already proved itself as the effective platform for free speech we need.
As for decentralisation versus centralisation, I personally am less worried about this aspect. I think it's good to have some level of expert, dedicated control over the protocol, for now.
Best of luck and please keep us updated!