Oh the learning curve is absolutely steep and moving past confusion is paid with real sweat and brain swelling :)
But as someone else wrote before, steemit is not really social media and not really an investment platform. It's a hybrid utilising blockchain, which makes it both unique and revolutionary!
Now as you've noticed, complexities are far beyond mere mortal's comprehension! It took me at least 4 weeks to understand what the floor is built of and how to walk on it, and only recently I got into technical phraseology such as "missing blocks" etc. And it's gonna take me a while to get to the bottom of it!
I think this is the edge of selection, that's both satisfying for those who managed to get into the game, and bewildering for the droputs or those who can't quite make it here.
The first ones feel lucky, cause it wasn't easy, and the latter ones have to deal with inevitable disappointment, that comes with lack of progress.
However, this will have to get sorted out, cause steemit will keep evolving only if adoption rate goes up, which is a big limiting factor due to all mentioned above.
But I can't really say how it should be done. Nobody wants socialism here, and definitely nobody wants more whiners. But to create a real threat for social media giants you have to get mass focus. Somehow you'd have to convince the masses to invest in steem too, and that's a tricky one, cause most of the people still live in web 2.0, which is basically about creating free content for no financial return.