Very interesting article.
A sidenote though that I thought of for anyone who knows:
Is the internal market of Steemit actually Bitshares or is it entirely independent? If it's nothing to do with bitshares, what is reasoning behind making it that way?
They are independent. The Steemit blockchain required modification to support the content related features required.
Ok. So the site couldn't use Bitshares then for some reason. I guess it could be hard to implement, considering how technical Bitshares is.