I think trust is why we want a decentralized platform. I don't trust the banks even a penny. Also I think fees would be required to facilitate these transactions. Will have to think of an innovative way to keep it free.
Contributing towards coding for Steemit, that's an interesting point you brought in. I'm a software developer myself and pretty passionate towards contributing towards the blockchain world. Can you help me understand the technology stack required.
I can't help you much yet....
Other than to point you to my recent article on creating the latest version of my Steemit Library. In that article, you'll find references and information about SteemSQL, which along with Python will give you quite a lot of access to the Steemit blockchain.
Steem web resources blog. I'll go through it over the weekend.
That's not the one I meant, but that probably has a lot of good info also.
This is the article I was talking about: