Nice post and as a plus it would alleviate a lot of the frustration people have been having over the last couple of days with Steemit being very slow or unavailable. Probably even a modest number of people switching to their own local Steemit app would make a big difference to the load on the "public utility" Steemit.
I notice that condenser has a Dockerfile and Vagrant - I'm guessing the node image that is based on needs MySQL to be present externally. Using docker-compose could easily fix this although I admit deploying Docker Compose apps is far from turnkey for most users, only developers.
It would be so nice if docker (now available easily on MacOS and Windows) could be the basis of distributing apps, at least under some layer that makes that feasible. Alternatively it is becoming increasingly easy to run Android apps on the desktop via Chrome or other Google magic. If there was a really great Steemit app (not just an HTML based app with a wrapper) that ran on Android we could reduce the problem to "how do we make it easy to run Android everywhere". Except of course iPhone users would lose out there.
My hope is that one day companies like Google, Amazon and Microsoft will give everyone the ability to deploy reasonably sized apps "to the cloud" for free and access them - decentralized apps like Steem make that feasible. That solves the problem for people without a desktop or laptop, and who's phone is a closed system or otherwise limited in capabilities.
Google already has a completely free teir for their compute platform, Amazon has a time limited free tier (not sure about Azure) - how long can it be before as well as gigs of free data storage we get Ghz of free compute capability?
In the meantime much kudos to you for actually jumping in an trying to make Condenser desktop friendly pretty much as is. :clapping: