While it's true that community building is the leading factor in prosperity on Steemit, I believe it's still the leading factor because Steemit is relatively young; therefore, it is still 'unmarred' or hasn't got the user numbers to make Facebook-like manipulations profitable. I for one deeply hope that things stay this way, and that if we survive the recent price dip, we'll overtake other social media.
price dip? We are up 250% in 3 months :) 3500% over the year. It is all about perspective.
There are lots of challenges we face and more to come. Let's see if this is a community or a bunch of individual optimisers.