Inspiring video, although tracking the apps that have been built over the course of 3 years at barely 2 dozen with a pulse today is a red flag for me, whether there's substantial promise not. We have some great devs, mainly ones the community has adopted and continued to reward to keep them here, but realistically only a handful.
https://www.stateofthedapps.com/rankings/platform/steem
While I had high aspirations for its potential, Steem feels a bit like an abandoned super mall because it's trying to be too much at once with very little demand. I think that there should be far more price agnostic demand by now from the crypto community. Something just doesn't seem right that people have to beg others to see its outstanding value, when it's not being organically recognized on its own at large. There are enough smart investors out there and the price is 98% from its ATH. It couldn't be more ripe for investors, but they're not really coming in in substantial volumes.
Also, while you're talking about users being laser focused on something, the blockchain seems to have quite a bit of a wide net that's not pulling in the haul we've all hope for. How could it be more focused? I don't know at the moment.
As for trying to promote to friends and family like I used to, the average human will see my efforts after years (because that's where they'll look first), attracting a microscopic piece of the daily user base's attention/rewards. As I've heard over and over, they'd find it to be too big of an uphill battle to think they'd ever break that pattern, and say no thanks.
If the people that have stuck around all get recognized and rewarded by the upper class more evenly (which should've happened more with the last fork), as most people put in the same hustle (albeit not investing time in politics or ass kissing), I think it'd be infinitely easier to retain them/use their network to recruit more users. Votes have been distributed a bit more, but it's still the same old names getting the same old votes and grandfathered pedestal treatment, with those who are just as deserving for their effort and loyalty rarely getting on the hit list. If they do, it's because of a small handful of nice people who get the bigger picture. Most don't, and diehard adopters who are educated on Steem and crypto fade away, costing Steem lots of future champions and adopters.