@beanz - you nailed it. These are definitely three big issues with the mass adoption of Steemit.
- One solution that has been proposed for this is to allow users to sign up for an account by buying 3 Steem using Bitcoin. Granted there are only a small set of users that would be able to do this, but most of the people who are against having a Facebook account would probably fall into that group.
- The password issue is a big one. I know @dantheman has been considering various options with this. The key though is that if users don't use secure passwords, someone will be able to crack them. It would be a publicity nightmare if after Steemit got going mainstream - millions of users got their accounts stolen and hacked. I think they are trying to find a good balance here to preserve security, and still allow for users to be, well.. 'users'.
- Yes! Yes! Yes! All of my non-Steemit friends are saying the same thing. The community definitely needs to work on making the content that bubbles up to the top more mainstream appealing. Not only that, but the people that are producing the type of content mainstream people are into, are not making as much because of where all the big payouts are going. I will say though that this has at least gotten better, even though there is still a long ways to go.