Steem is overcomplicated, but there ways to get people on board quickly, eg create an account with RCs and delegate to them. The token based does like palnet are interesting as they hide a lot of the spammy, over promoted posts. Having them for specialist interests like sport or finance may bring in more people. It is not too hard to earn those tokens and gain some influence there. Probably easier than with just with Steem.
Steemit have failed us on SMTs. Maybe they have potential, but it's just been too long.
I think what Steem Ninja is doing will help a lot. They are making it easy for people to buy an account and with their new Invite initiative, existing Steem users can mine invites which can then be sent to friends/family or customers. The new user really doesn't need to know the underlying mechanics in order to get and account and start interacting.
what's the point in earning tokens that have no value cos they are to hard to buy and are not easily exchangeable
The fact that they are hard to buy makes for better curation and people will still earn Steem unless votes do as some do and set up an account that just has those tokens. I only have time to run one account.
They will (hopefully) easily exchangeable. It's on SMT whitepaper that they will use bancor-like protocol to easily trade between SMT to SMT and SMT to STEEM so there will never be liquidity issues.