It seems ironic to me, if Steem is going to really grow, it has to happen at the social/attention layer (IMO), but so many of our developers want to focus on the blockchain layer.

Yeah. Even in the gaming space I think people's first instinct is to focus on the financial aspect (micropayments, "owning" components, etc.) rather than the social media interaction aspect. One of the ideas I was toying with some years ago was a digital version of a simple social drawing game, the idea being that the group would have the fun of playing but in the process you're also creating an "artifact of play" that works as a light social media post. (This is what made WORDLE so big, playing it produced something that looked like it would be fun to post as a tweet). Unfortunately I currently can't really justify putting much time and effort into projects that don't have a reasonable chance of contributing to keeping a roof over my head and food on my table, so I doubt I can do much experimenting myself.