Your points are very valid, @taliakerch, but we really must remember that steem is technically still in beta.

It may be a bit too soon to write it off just yet. 😎

My feeling is that a number of critical issues still needs to be addressed before we should consider things in full production.

One of the less regarded ones is the scalability issue which is being kept at bay by throwing RAM at it. Development is underway to deal with the issue... yet nothing concrete at this point.

Then there is the matter of counterfeit steem which was addressed in an old blog post of mine whose link is provided for your reading pleasure.

https://steemit.com/steem-network/@novacadian/where-is-the-trust-in-proof-of-brain-mining

Another blog post of mine suggests a means to help deal with counterfeit steem. Its link is provided below for your reading pleasure.

https://steemit.com/steem/@novacadian/a-decentralized-capcha-annonymous-proof-of-brain-verification

Hopefully if those two critical issues can be dealt with then the rest is political as new users begin to erode the inbalance of stake which we now find on the platform.

Call me an eternal optimist, but to me the future looks good for steem and DPOS.