You're right the UI is terrible. Maybe it improves (which would be somewhat of a miracle at this point after years of mostly not, but you never know) or maybe other apps and UIs continue to grow and take its place.
Anyway, as a Steem witness and Steem stakeholder and not a steemit.com witness nor a Steemit shareholder, my primary concern is that the blockchain mechanisms function effectively, which from all available evidence at this point requires a much higher (than 25%) curation split.
Which, of course, I told them in 2016 and if they had listened to me we could have avoided onboarding thousands of users under the false promise that a system paying the author 75% of the payouts would actually work. Now, unfortunately, we have to pay the substantial costs (not only this one by any means) of remedying years of bad decisions and general neglect. Hopefully it isn't too late and we manage to turn things around.
I really hope we can turn things around, especially in the face of Voice. The funding will help, once SPS is in place I'm applying for a marketing budget for Dlease and Tokenbb, I still think they can go viral given the right marketing.