I'm foggy on your point 2.
You seem to be saying that "the company" screwed up by not incentivizing people to buy directly from them, but instead to lease SP from other users.
The problem with that argument is that there is no "company" when it comes to buying STEEM. Whether you buy it on the internal market for SBD or externally for Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies, you are buying it from another person. The Steem blockchain and steemit.com are both open source and as far as I can tell, there is no way we could even give money to those "directly tied into the company ecosystem" unless we sent STEEM/SBD directly to their steemit account as a tip.
Other frontends take a cut of the author rewards for posting on their site, but as far as I can tell, steemit.com deliberately doesn't do this exactly to encourage more users to come in. Imagine if you were only making 0.01 cent per post and steemit.com was taking a cut of your rewards!
So, I'm not sure what you are saying with point number 2. More people are going to invest in Steem when they realize that STEEM = Steem Power = More STEEM, but I'd reckon that the forthcoming steemit app and post-beta website will make it much easier/more apparent to do so. Remember, we are only in beta here with about 25k active users. Facebook wasn't monetized like it was when it was only accessible to college students in the beginning, either. But keeping it free and useful sure did encourage people to use it. steemit is like that, but since its a) decentralized and b) pays you to use it, it's much better than Facebook and I don't think it will have any problems growing very fast.
Nice post, thanks for sharing.
Well...you are spot on right about the 'cash flow' situation. I obviously didn't think that aspect through, before I wrote it. So thanks for a reminder on that.
What I was trying to say with number two was maybe more an observation, that people have been so accustomed to everything online being free, that they may be reluctant to invest in a phenomenon as Steemit.
That opens up another interesting question: what kind of people will constitute the main user base on Steemit in the future? Or maybe rather: could Steemit become so mainstream (mainsteem...) that people started posting babyphotos, random rants, and sharing the same type of stuff they now share on FB? Or will the platform rather appeal to 'bloggers' in a very wide sense. You seem to believe the ladder is the case, but at this point, anything could happen, I think.
Cheers!