Let me try to bring my two cents to the discussion.

What we (@steemstem) are trying to do: creating a science lover community on the STEEM blockchain. And by this, we have in mind a community including top scientists who can share their knowledge, their work, with the general audience on the blockchain.

By community, we do not only mean promoting good content (which we manage to do more or less anyways, thanks to the support we managed to gather here and there (and for which we are thankful to our supporters)). This also means having people exchanging with each others on the chat, discussing about science, etc... It is a real community. It goes beyond the curation group effort.

Now, what can we do for steem? Well, promoting steem through crazy meetups (like having the first steemstem meetup 100 meters underground inside the LHC at CERN where general public cannot even go, even if they ask...) is something we can do. Some of us have connections in the academic world, allowing this to happen. I like to believe this is something good for Steem. Of course, this is my opinion (probably shared by some of us).

Now to come back to the initial message.... To achieve what we did so far, to get where we are today, I am personally working (yes, we can call that a work at this level) more than 40 hours per week. The same holds for most of the people in our team (we are of about 20 today). Our impression is that Steemit inc (not steem) does not even care about that. We have never heard anything from them. Not a single sound.

This is what @trumpman said. Sometimes it is frustrating to see where the big delegations go, especially knowing the work we do (for mostly free).