I agree with your sentiments steemit can only do so much and should focus on the blockchain and underlying tech while communities take the opportunity to build their projects on top of it creating value for the blockchain and STEEM overall.
I think the ideal of STEEM is way to closely affliated with Steemit and Steemit inc and thats fine for now, we're still figuring things out and eventually STEEM will take centre stage like ETH has done for ICO's and dApps, it will do so for community and content based projects/dApps.
It is certainly a long term play and I feel that everyone that is in steem now is an ambassador for the platform. I'm personlly growing my account and powering up so that I can use my account as a marketing tool for those id like to recruit to the platform ive already brought in 5 people to steemit and I can tell you it wasn't easy but if we all pay it forward and 1 brings in another we'll have a bigger stronger community that has personal relationships and will bring new ideas to the platform.
Its slow now but we can see growth by the ammount of accounts powering up and moving up the ranks, this will compound over time and i'm super bullish on STEEM as a project but I'll admit I am biased lol