So, I'll remain a sporadic contributor and continue to hope Steem improves as a social network when SMTs and Communities launch.

hope is no advisor. Isn't the nice thing with crypto that economic proposals are predictive? You can see by its design whether it benefits the user/customer and will increase network-effects which give a network its user-value and finally its marketvalue. Decentralization is quantifiable, there is no maybe. Either a system is a more equally distributed system or it is not.

The pockets of complexity where there is irreducibility are the tricky part, but here you have science and simulations. When there is a hardfork proposed by the Ethereum foundation or Bitcoin foundation, then they write tons of peer-reviewed papers on the issue, they run simulations, co-lab with universities like MIT. I wonder why Steemit Inc. needs nothing of that kind?