Has musing help the steemit platform very much in retaining the newbies ?

Musing has definitely helped keep a lot of smaller minnows on the Steemit. It's one of the few places a minnow can go to make a guaranteed profit, aside from Utopian.io. Musing allows minnows to make something for the great content they write, no matter how large their audience.

Most of the people that find Steemit interesting are not the "get-rich-quick" type, and enjoy the notion of writing content to gain followers, but many are dissuaded from using Steemit due to how hard it is to grow at all. Musing allows people to make some money from Steemit, and possibly gain a small audience by posting great questions and answers.