I really don't think that they should be focusing on making too many updates or improvements to SteemIt.com. Right now the whole Steem ecosystem is far too dependent on SteemIt.com as the only front-end as was evident from the recent DDOS events.
The idea behind the Steem platform is that any number of different front-end sites can be created on top of it. I think the SteemIt, Inc team should be focusing on creating tools, frameworks, etc to make it as easy as possible for others to create their own front ends to the Steem blockchain such as busy.org and chainbb.com.
When SMTs come out I think it would be great to not only have an easy way to create your own tokens, but also to have an easy way to launch your own front-end site using those tokens. If you create your own site on top of Steem then you can fix all of the "issues" you may see with SteemIt.com however you see fit. Then if others also like your changes they can switch to using your site.
This is where I think the real future of the Steem platform is - a whole series of different sites / communities etc built on top of the Steem blockchain, using their own tokens and SteemIt.com fading into the background.