One major point you bring up is the desperate need for steem/fiat pairings. The fact that you have to go from STEEM to something else before going to fiat is a major drawback. Like you said, it increases the risk.
As for the volatility, we will see if/when that settles down. In general, that is one attack on crypto that cannot be disputed...the volatility of the tokens makes it difficult to conduct commerce. Over time, it should lessen a bit but it might not. That is why Bitshares created the pairs that are held at a dollar so that merchants can price stuff accurately.
For this entire arena, we are so early that it is hard to tell what will unfold.
Yes, of course we still are in the early phase. We don'k know what kind of regulamentation we will have, we don't know how will crypto-markets evolve in the future, and we don't know what kind of developement will affect crypo protocols and token management.
Here we hare having some theoric talks, we are triyng to predict the
unpredictable...