Excellent reply; you gave voice to what was rattling around in my head. It certainly is disturbing to me that Steemit doesn't want to improve the site without offering some alternative. Perhaps the site could eventually be moved into an open community where all the users essentially play a role. Some would do the actual coding, others would "vote" for features by putting STEEM into escrow to pay the coders. Likewise marketing, project management, etc. Unfortunately, such a system is likely to suffer from huge amounts of inefficiency, so it may well be bad idea.
Ultimately, if Steemit is going to grow and attract users, some group needs to be constantly improving it. I would argue that right now Medium is a much nicer site to use. If that doesn't change I fear Steemit will end up sitting on history's rubbish heap.