Thank you for the article reference. Yes, it is very interesting. The author is quite visionary. However, I don't think he has a clue as to how extensive and difficult his ideas may be to implement.
I'm not discounting them, or saying they can't be realized... Just observing that there is a huge amount of work implied by his excellent ideas for what Steemit could become.
If I were given such a task, the very first thing I would work on would be creating a fundamental framework to support independently developed plug-ins. It is probably a reasonable idea to begin with an existing, already very mature content management system (CMS) such as WordPress...