Steemit relies on the network effect. Without investors paying fee's, sustaining the developers, nodes, miners, and users there would be a smaller network. Storj is cool, but how do you handle backups? Lose your key lose your data. Most people ignore backups. iCloud provides that as a service/convenience.
There's also another factor, network traffic will increase everywhere. p2p, this will tax providers quite a bit if it does get bigger along with utility. The main one being network, because users will process overall traffic will increase. In the current model its something like 90/10 10 % of the users use the majority of bandwidth. In peer to peer, this will likely lead to throttling or tiers of data again. All things that hopefully will need to be addressed. The federated model we have now is subsidized by business. So the average person will go from not paying for certain things to paying.
How is it profitable? Through inflation? How do the devs get paid after the initial allocation? What is their incentive to keep building. The only way to earn a return is if someone pays more, but then why would you spend if you don't have to. Things will change for sure. I don't question making progress, just wondering how it will become sustainable.