Disclaimer: Everything in the post is personal opinion.

Introduction

This post wants to answer the question @timcliff opened a discussion about:
What are reasons investors avoid STEEM?
Here is the post of @timcliff, I'd suggest reading through the comment section since there a lot of good answers.

Strengths

There are many features that Steem has that differentiate its blockchain from others:

3 second transactions

High scalability (Steem can scale to 1000s of transactions per second)

A user base of +1 Million Users

HF20 Upcoming (Scheduled to take place on Tuesday, September 25, at 11:00am EST)

AppBase

RocksDB

DPOS

Dev Community (Steem has more devs than the majority of blockchains)

SMT's (Scheduled Testnet for January 2019 and Scheduled Mainnet for March 2019)

Weaknesses

Of course there are some weaknesses too that might drive away investors:

Inflation (This is not an actual weakness since the new Steem created is distributed in a fair way but it can cause many investors to run away, specially those who are not well-informed and still think Steem has a 100% inflation rate when in fact it has much less inflation than many other coins out there)

Lack of Good Content (Even though good content exists on Steem those posts are usually buried down by other users with a higher promotion budget)

Steemit Inc owns a large stake (I don't see this as being a problem as long as most of those resources are used in the proper way, however for investors that haven't really looked at Steem more in depth this fact makes a lot of them run away)

Lack Of Knowledge and Misinformation

This is by far and without a doubt the biggest problem Steem currently has, many possible investors simply don't dedicate enough time to read Steem's Whitepaper, SMT's Whitepaper, examine how DPOS works and all the other things that make Steem what it is.
Also, misinformation has caused many investors to believe things that are not true such as for example saying that Steem has a 100% inflation rate.
Lack of Knowledge and Misinformation are what have caused Steem to not be in the top 20 or even in the top 10 (from my perspective).

Projects that deserve having less MarketCap than Steem but currently have a higher one

Here are just a few of coins that deserve to be below Steem from my point of view:

Dogecoin (This is a meme coin, even its founder says they are highly overvalued)

Bitcoin Gold (Absolutely Fork Trash, don't really know why anybody would have any BTG anyways)

Bytecoin (Super Cheap Hot Altcoin!!!)

Bitcoin Cash (What do they have besides adding block size?)

There are many other coins that have a higher market cap than Steem and that don't deserve their position, you can look them up yourself.

Conclusion

With HF20 Velocity coming, SMT's coming too and the Steemit Inc team informing everyone about what they are doing more frequently through @steemitblog Steem has great potential and being able to buy Steem at less than 1$ it is what being blessed must feel like.

If you like what @humanheart is doing you can support it by approving its witness, here is the Steem Connect link in case you wanna vote for @humanheart for witness

Due to the fact currently @humanheart's witness earnings only cover 5% of the server costs this posts liquid rewards will go to paying those