The small blocks and block time are exactly why there's still empty blocks.
Steem was built to upscale like crazy which by all accounts is a good thing. Empty blocks = room for growth without a need for a hard fork to increase the block size or reduce block time confirmation. I've noticed that the average time to complete a STEEM transaction is about 5 minutes which is nothing compared to the hours I've waited for a Bitcoin transaction to be validated.
Block size and block confirmation times are something Bitcoin users know all too well is a real pain. It has been a matter of debate for many months because a hard fork to increase the Bitcoin block size to over the 1MB cap would render current ASIC's useless and put the screws to many major mining operations.
Bitcoin has all but maxed out the network's ability to process blocks at a reasonable rate because of the block size issue, but no one can seem to stop arguing about it long enough to just fork and fix it. It's a real damned if you do, damned if you don't issue that I'm sure we'll hear more about sooner rather than later.