I never felt this way to be honest. I joined Discord channels to improve relationships. I do feel like content here can be lackluster or posted just to earn money, but I am enjoying my time here. I have made some good gains and made new friends.
At the same time, I feel like Steemit might be an experiment. They want to come up with SMT for people to implement on their own site. Sites like Steemit, Busy, DTube show a proof of concept, but who knows, maybe the future of Steem is to implement SMTs on other sites and Steem tokens being use for bandwidth.