Hi,
We very much do still use the Steem block chain.
You can verify this by using the site while only being logged into your Steem account.
The reason we've resorted to implementing our own chain is that the Steem offering did not provide the required flexibility that we were looking for. For example, we feel it important that video creators are rewarded much beyond the limit imposed by Steem and our rewarding mechanism is also something which is similar to but not possible under Steem.
It's a shame you feel the site is broken, we obviously don't, but we'd be happy to listen to where your finding issue and perhaps we can see where you feel we could improve. User feedback is vital (both positive and negative) and is almost always welcomed.
I don't understand what is missing on Steem. If the numbers you've provided on monthly visitors and user growth are real then there would be plenty of opportunities for you to monetize that traffic of which a portion of the external value that flows in gets added to the reward pool in the form of liquid STEEM tokens. Which can be distributed in whatever way you or the userbase finds fitting.
This isn't so much an issue with the user base and growth, while we have had issues with users gaining steem accounts, our primary concerns were related to on-going monetisation of users content (past 7 days), having a single liquid asset which would provide the basis for voting power and an ability to provide an uncapped voting asset.
We also took issue with the rampant use of "bidbots" and other activities which are almost encouraged in the steem environment. Through the remove of "delegation" features we are able to combat that and we can ensure that votes are cast by users as opposed to being paid for.
This isn't an issue of monetisation, as stated, it's an issue of flexibility and of the operations provided by the chain.
"I don't understand what is missing on Steem."
Steem only believes in 2 million Steem delegation for video, they clearly don't believe video is the future. That is why more flexibility is needed, you need a more liquid reward system that goes all into video
half of the videos just straight up don't play or take ages to load. I don't have gigabit internet, but it's pretty damn good.
If you're on your own chain, and you only use stteem for account login, do you really deserve delegation from steemit?