"Bitshares has a problem, though. Adoption.
Adoption has stagnated. With low usage comes poor liquidity, lack of price parity with outside exchanges, and virtually unusable trading pairs." In my opinion both steemit and bitshares are going to see mass adoption when something in the market changes. See how many people from vine came to youtube and got really famous, even though they didn't make that much money if any on vine. For example if medium.com were to close down and its audience moved to steemit, then steemit adoption would increase. There just needs to be a catalyst event like I mentioned that would offload a bunch of existing users of a centralized exchange to bitshares. For example when binance was down recently some people thought they got hacked. Imagine they did get hacked and people started distrusting centralized exchanges then it would increase adoption of bitshares. Two things that you as an individual can do to increase adoption is to help make the wallet UI easier to use and also to come up with ways to help people get fiat into some form of crypto or even into bitshares without having to make use of a centralized exchange.