Very well summarised.
How about 'it's hard to make it not sound like a Ponzi scheme'.
There was some really interesting chat yesterday in the Witness Forum about the language sounding childish and/ or cultish too - Power Up and Witness for example....
The learning curve was also mentioned, although hopefully with Dapps this won't be such a big deal - as they develop, using Steem should hopefully become a bit more intuitive.
It is hard to explain how people can get paid with no ads or anyone paying in. I tend to phase out when people start explaining the intricacies of Steem finance.
I have thought that the sites could pop up help for new users suggesting things they could do. Remember Microsoft Clippy? Of course it should be easy to turn off, but it is not always obvious what to do. We need some good user experience people on the project teams.
I have talked about implementing gamification on STEEM front end quite a lot with close friends. Basically, make it feel exciting and vivid to use the blockchain. Sound effects, visual effects are often looked down upon by devs as “shallow eye candy,” but the look and feel of a system being pleasing is what matters to users. This is what is known as UX or User Experience.
If I were to develop anything to run a blockchain like STEEM, it would be treated like a video game, modular in build so it could run from top-of-the-line specs and VR all the way down to super-basic laptops. Basically a software approach instead of website, though the web client could be a gimped version of it.
Perhaps you should get to building. :)
Pop ups are a nice idea!