What concerns me most is indeed the lack of vision and development of this platform but also how the founders handled the language barrier by selling their tech to someone so it can clone the whole thing instead of adding a simple translation functionality on the site. This to me indicates that they don't want steemit to become this social media powerhouse, they just want their patented blockchain to be used by every social media.

What they fail to understand is that this strategy is doomed for failure, social media is all about network effect, the more sites you create the less chances these sites will gain any kind of momentum. My first post on steemit was how to retain user base and get a network effect going by creating a very interactive environment . https://steemit.com/steem/@snowflake/steem-vision-short-introduction

Also I totally agree with your post, the gaming and fun aspect of earning money and using this site is completely missing. There is millions of dollar in the steemit account, it would cost them less than 50k to hire a team of UI designers for a couple weeks to add all functionalities and redesign the interface into something modern and catchy. Why they don't do it is the question...
It makes no sense to want to have every feature ( chat, messaging,etc..) decentralized, what matters is that the code is open source and communication end to end encrypted. As long as you have that you can transport all functionnalities on a tor site ( someone already does this) or soon on maidsafe.