And we have one very big difference...

We seem to expect everything to come from Steemit.

Back in the day practically nothing came from Steemit. Nearly everything came from the community.

I agree that this is a problem. My suspicion is that there's a tragedy-of-the-commons style problem, in that people are uncertain about the future of the platform so they are reluctant to commit time and resources to try to make it succeed, and if few people are trying to make it succeed then success is less likely.

Personally, my projects have fizzled because I kept running into issues where I couldn't accomplish 100% of what I was trying to do via the APIs, but I didn't want to deal with the hassle and expense of trying to get a full node running.