I would disagree that there are countless other amazing apps/dapps. That is a bunch of cheerleading nonsense which does not hold up to scrutiny. None of them are lighting the world in fire in terms of adoption any better than Steemit is. Most of them only exist because they are milking the free steemit delegation and would fold like a cheap suit in about five minutes if that went away.
Steemmonsters is the most promising I know about, and the only one that I would say still has real hope of making a major difference, although it is too early to know whether it actually will. That is not countless. It is one.
Steem is a very powerful blockchain and has some good to great capabilities but we still need new blood coming in and coming up with creative ideas for using it because what we have so far has not found the magic formula at all.
This ultimately comes down to the same issue of awareness and marketing though.