Excellent comment @Steevc especially regarding the political leanings here. The problem is, how can the balance be re-addressed when the platform is decentralised and censorship-free? It's quite the dichotomy.
The single most important thing to onboard the masses is simply down to the mobile experience which is close to non-existent here. I've banged on about it for years and it's no better than 3 years ago. I do wonder whether certain devs and whales actually want mass adoption as they seem quite comfortable on trending every day with a guaranteed income, there seems very little motivation to vastly increase the user base.
Again, auto voting I've whinged about for years. 'nuff said!
Some things don't seem to change much. eSteem is not a terrible mobile app, but it is all we have now. We do generally have a better set of whales than on Steem, but there is much that could be better and so we do not grow.