Hey man, glad to read your message!
Sadly, the core platform is not about to change in those regards. What my hope is that the SMTs would allow for the emergence of other platforms, also based on the Steem blockchain but with their own set of rules. And someday, maybe, eventually, we could possibly get a crowdsources knowledge based with crypto rewards. I could easily see a Superuser-like forum platform that awards tokens as well. Why not even a Discord channel, where each reaction to a message is a reward?
Re: Steepshot. We trialed that and while the interface of the phone app is ok bordering on mediocre, it's usable. The main problem is that Steepshot platform takes 25% of your earnings. Fair enough, I would say, even if you have to dig quite a bit to learn that.
Right now the wife (@bghandmade) is trying to re-start using Steemit by back-posting some photos from the growing season. She found out the easier way to do it was via the main Steemit site, opened as a "Chrome app". Give it a try!