One of the great dreams of Steem, as I see it, is that it's a way to connect socially in a way that's actually productive. I'm not really involved with PALnet or other initiatives, but I do enjoy the notion of curation.
Maybe this is just me, but I find that my creative endeavors are motivated not by money (though money would help me focus on them more) but rather on whether or not they contribute. One of the things that I love about Steem is that every once in a while you'll hear from someone who really engaged with your content, and you have the opportunity to provide the same boost to other people.
With that said, I've never viewed curation as being what I get back, but always what I create with it. I'll sometimes buy SBI shares for people as a form of curation (this has a decent ROI, which is good if you're finding that you primarily vote minnows who don't wind up getting many votes, and also gives them a consistent stream of future upvotes).
It's definitely way more productive than any other social medium I've been part of - every :-) Although I even got some jobs by networking on twitter, so it's not that I never got value from other social media as well.
Yes, this is my favourite part of Steem as well - I always have created content in one way or another but almost never did I get in real conversations - on other platforms a 'great shot!' or 'wow that's so pretty!' is all you get and on here there's often more thought put in the comments - which for artists or any other content creator is a great valuable thing to have :-)
SBI is awesome in that you both help yourself and someone else by buying them :-)
The thing I love about Steem is that I find it to be a consistently positive experience. I've had maybe two or three negative experiences during my whole time here, and a couple times when I went on and it was just a slow day (cough or a hardfork went wrong cough) but I have had hundreds or thousands of positive experiences for each bad one.
It's just a great platform for communication because people have stake in actually contributing to the point that it's worth something.
I like to think of it as the difference between my college required discussion boards back in the day, where everyone just wrote what they had to to get by, and the sort of conversations you'd have with friends. It's wonderful how much you can connect to people.