I have no idea why they haven't made this more of a priority, but this is something the community may be able to help with as well. Especially with the help of the SPS to pay for listings.
I do know some exchanges only want to talk to the CEO or main development team of the project though...
If the exchanges want to speak to the dev team I can broker a meeting with the Steemit team, I did so before with paycent.com to organise crypto debit cards that directly accept Steem.
A lot of the applications on the websites ask you if you are a member of the development team or director of the project... making it seem like they prefer to speak with them.
The way I deal with those is I ask Justin from Steemit if I can put his email down as a point of contact.