Very interesting video. I welcome the competition.
With respect to code quality, steemd may seem to be "monolithic", but most of the features used by steemit.com are optional plugins. It is possible for exchanges and currency users to run with only 15% of the memory usage and much less CPU usage.
Good to hear you welcome the competition.
I'm guessing people will not truly get to see the power of Steem until other applications emerge (beyond Steemit) that leverage the Steem protocol.