It's probably a widely recognized fact by now that #steemit, the basic template that it is, won't change. Our next big hope is what @ned himself is cooking up with that project Destiny of his, the one for "on boarding casual Joes/Janes" you know. Maybe that project includes the said better interface, with actual social sharing functions?
The second best option, but unfortunately a very remote possibility right now -- an independent dev team designing a revolutionary new interface, possibly through a #utopian-io cooperative process. Except so far interface development project have been about individualistic competition, which is not a bad thing, but when most dare not deviate too much from steemit's template (the specialized one's that tried, like Musing, dlike, SteemHunt are very-narrowly focused and barren of functionality) lest they lose out on comparability, where not revolutionizing as much as iterating on the same thing.
As for "playing the game", you are a businessman, so I suppose you see the optimal "earning" opportunities on STEEM and that "game" (along with paid crypto promotion campaigns) does seem to be the best way to "earn a living" on STEEM right now? I've not come here to earn though, so I'm a bit more free to mess about with the platform in "unproductive" ways. That said I do want to see the platform grow and will direct my own efforts there, limited as they are.
I don't really keep up with the inner workings of Steemit so it's good to hear maybe there's some hope and there's some development going on. One thing I will say that I enjoy about this platform is it's kind of an anything goes platoform. While I enjoy talking about Entrepreneurship and business I'm not lockedin to talking about those topics
Well If you're interested in occasional re-steems about updates on STEEM's inner working or new interaction tools, you can see those in my feed. Some stuff I re-steem is a bit on the technical side or has to do with art tools and contests, but I try to keep up with and track down generally useful stuff as well:
How about voicing your concerns to @ned directly, in this Q&A
Or, have you heard about dclick, STEEM-based AdSense -- additional monetization for your posts?
That kind of stuff.
I'm definitely gonna check out a lot of the stuff you've mentioned, however I do think that is part and parcel of the problem, and maybe it's just how Steemit is built, again that type of stuff is way over my head but your casual social media user needs things simple, easy and dumbed down. The fact I have to hop around to 6 sites to interact with one site, quite frankly I'm too lazy to do it and it just seems like too much dedication to the platform to have to learn and keep up with all this stuff. The stuff you mentioned, especially the Dclick interests me so I will look into it but that's kinda why I havn't gotten more involved and also what hinders adoption