Interesting thoughts. From my perspective, I've allways seen steem as 'self publishing' if I'm honest. Partly because all of my content in the beginning was ficton, poetry and travel posts. I wasn't really comfortable with the title blogging, because it's not what I was doing.
When I look at steem, there does seem to be a distinction between people blogging (talking about their lives) and people writing (producing a themed product/article). Nothing wrong with either, and one isn't better than the other. But as you've pointed out, steemit has never identified itself to the outside world as a publishing portal. It's always sold itself as a blogging platform, regardless of the fact there's quite a large amount of people producing creative writing, art and music on here.
I wonder what effect it would have if steemit.inc changed how they market the blockchain to reflect these facets of steem.
Yeah, there is nothing wrong with it, I just think publishing covers a broader area.