Probably the two biggest additions are that Steemit is rewarding legitimate content with their stake and communicating regularly, and the powerdown time has been cut more than 2/3. Both of those are independently immense improvements, even if they way we got here was troubling.

Also the dev team that made two disastrous hardforks has moved on, quite a few habitual abusers (in the human sense) went with them, and the culture of downvoting as a form of political harassment has been greatly reduced (except on one topic, unfortunately).

It remains to be seen whether the new Steemit can put together a dev team that can pull things forward, won't be in complete denial about the real problems with steemd's design, or can do anything about preventing personal abuse and harassment on a more systematic level. But so far there's been quite a bit of quiet good mixed in with the drama, which is a step up from the previous two years.