Steem is a hard sell until it gets more User Friendly.
Like a LOT MORE user friendly.
Not sure we need SBD, and many features I think history will show, are very difficult to support long term, with unregulated market forces. SBD has almost never worked as intended, and is more of a problem (very difficult to explain to mere mortals, constantly broken, huge liability, not really needed initially until tethering is much better understood).
The development going into it now on the front end clients is very encouraging, they will need some time to get marketing working; which Steemit never attempted to do seriously (daily email digest, news releases, music festivals).
There are limits on how user friendly it can be unless people surrender some trust to a third party. You have to look after your own keys, but we're seeing attempts to make that easier, e.g. Steem Keychain. We need apps like eSteem as that's what is expected these days. It's getting there, slowly, but other platforms could creep up and grab the public attention