I share your passion on the subject. For the last several years, the bulk of my income has been earned from online writing, and Steemit pays far, far less than that at present. I have personally been signing up four or five new users a week - a few of whom are really taking to the platform - and a small but growing portion of my regular readership is now reading my stuff here. But most of my regular readers will not create accounts until there is far more clarity about how Steemit works on the landing page. They just click on direct links to read and then move on to other, more familiar websites. (This is standard, in my experience. The weekly news report I edit has 14K subscribers and nearly fifty times as many readers.)
Simply providing better pageview and other metrics on steemit.com would go a long way to clarifying the actual reach of steemit posts. This, in turn, would make the site far more attractive to investors as well as to prospective active users.
The bounties are great, but we still don't have a good incentivized referral system. And the people I know in media will not do more than dip their toes in the water here until content creators are paid industry standard compensation.
IMHO, we are under-capitalized and poorly marketed as a whole. People like me are helping with the latter issue, but I feel there is strong ideological reluctance around here to discuss the former issue in any terms that non-crypto investors would find familiar enough to pay attention to.
Through conversations like this, though, I imagine that these problems will likely be solved sooner rather than later: )