RE: Why do the experienced avoid Steem like the plague?

I would say all the above have some part in this...

But there a few other possibilities to add:

too much power in very few hands. This make steem waaaay more centralized than any other blockchain project
those holding that power spend too much time shilling the system than actually improving it (with a few exceptions of course)
steem was never "marketed" (is that a word?) The right way since the begining. It was always about "how much money you can make" and not about "how useful can this be"
the ascendency of (even if for a short time) of characters that clearly had the objective of sucking the reward pool dry (can I already say it's name? Or we are still receiving flags for that) and with the support of some big stake holders
2017 price spike was way more damaging to Steem image than anything else. At the time, using steemit = free money
a CEO that was pretty incompetent, more worried about making his old partner look bad than improving what needed to be improved
a endless circle-jerking among big stake holders
some witnesses that dont seem to understand what their actual role is supposed to be
probably a lot of other stuff I can't remember right now.
oh yeah, I remembered another one: compared to other platform, steem is way worse to professional content creator (why the fuck would I choose to have only 7 days to receive from my work if I can be paid for life as long as my content is up?)