Steem hardly sucks. It needs to be put into comparison with all other projects to be evaluated. When you do that Steem is pretty awesome.
Our Distribution/Decentralization - much better then most
Our Inability to Reward Engaging Content without Curation Guilds or Buying Votes - wer pretty unique at this and do it better then almost all smaller copycats.
Our Funky and Confusing Relationship with SteemIt Inc. - We froze their stake, nothing confusing there, and other projects are much more centralized then us
Our User Retention - Price goes up, users go up. At least we have users unlike 99% of other projects.
Our Young and Immature Applications - Same everywhere else
Probably Many Other Things - Same everywhere else.