Glad you are so passionate. Bottom line is STEEM as a crypto currency relies on the trust of steem inc because of their disproportional large stake. This is true of the blockchain itself, so the idea of being censor proof is not true, they have the power to literally replace the whole witnesses stack.

Where does the value lie then? midlet has convinced me that there are exciting developments which I need to look into, some of the community has started building their own solutions to these problems and are building their own networks... thats great. This is a solution to my main issues with steem.

As far as better platforms to develop on, or for user experience... yes ETH. There are amazing DeFi apps on eth that work very smoothly and have real world utility Look at maker/dai and an entire ecosystem of apps they are building. Just this one project's ecosystem is quickly growing larger than all of steem combined. There are entertainment apps like breaker.io who are connecting with real filmmakers and have built a fantastic streaming app that everytime someone buys the film can split payments across 100 investors and the entire crew. Aragon allows you to build businesses and manage finances as a DAO. District0x has started releasing their first Token Curated Registries, and users will be able to build their own like building a website. (steems design for curating content is a TCR). Developers want build where there are working stable coins, on/off ramps for fiat, decentralized exchanges, other merchants actually using the stablecoin or base currency. They want developer tools for building apps and analyzing the blockchain... Steem has some of this but are so often broken when I try them, hardly maintained even by the "active" witnesses who built them.

If steemmonstors is steem's crown jewel then that says a lot by itself, glad you like it though. The point of this post is to shed light onto why there aren't more/better developers building on steem, and the answer is they are busy building in better networks plain and simple. If you are too caught up to explore other platforms and discover why that is your own problem.