I've thought that adverts should be here from the beginning, with a profit sharing model.
They don't necessarily even have to take a percentage though, as many different terms of service for adverts do not allow sharing a percentage of the money. Due to this, they can actually choose to take 100% of these ads, and share a percentage, possibly even 100%, of the ones that do allow profit sharing. I believe that adverts would give people a lot more incentive to post content, as they could get income on content, even after payout.
A potential problem I can see with this is possibly ending up sending lots of Steem or SBD to accounts that are no longer active. Of course, that could actually be a good thing, as a large amount of Steem may eventually be tied up. That lowers potential supply. There are already a ton of accounts that have had their passwords lost.
The majority of problems people have with ads are specific types. We don't have to use popups or popunders. We don't have to have annoying vids that require you to watch them to see content. We can just use simple banner ads on the top and bottom, and potentially some sides. Maybe if we really need the money we can put them at the bottom of posts. We can host simple images on the steem interfaces to avoid tracking. We don't have to use anything that is a security risk. We can get paid without being Facebook. They chose to be that scummy.