Steem has hard stops for writers. When I started, just like many newcomers, I didn't have a following, and I've seen thousands who come with great content and are discouraged almost right away because they can't get ahold of some readers.
Medium and other such middlemen-based alternatives do provide a bit more of a guarantee of readers and payment for now, but it's of course at the price of paying the middleman for something that Steem would do for free.
I think that Steem can be greatly improved to favour bloggers, but I'm not sure if that's the focus we want to have. There are also the dApps for many purposes, the SMTs that are coming, the many communities. All of these are Steem amplifiers and things that will work together to make the price of Steem go up when the next bull-run comes.
Do you think Steem should focus on being a blogging platform, something else, something in-between or what? This is a controversial topic nowadays on the blockchain.
Medium is much older than Steem. Initially, on Medium there was mostly only your Twitter following and if that was large enough you could show up on their internal analytics and potentially be curated to the front.
I agree that blogging may not be the highlight of the blockchain in the near future but I doubt it will completely go away. I'm hoping to see some improvements in that aspect for readers and curators and I'm sure with oracles and SMT's that's something that can be improved a lot to make the onramp even easier for new authors that don't already have a big following that they bring along with them.