I see your point and I certainly respect and admire your involvement in the community. As I said in the beginning of my comment I think the learning curve for the entire Steem ecosystem is still going up - we're in the middle of an experiment.
I will continue to stay involved in curation projects and also testing the platform as a content provider. It's less than 3 weeks since I'm here and at the end of my test period (which I arbitrarily set it to 30 days) I will make a full review of my activity.
But even now the balance tilts up and most likely I will continue to use and promote the platform. I brought around 4-5 high quality writers here and I am actively trying to convince them to contribute.
With my limited experience in the platform (but with more than 17 years on the internet) I will boldly choose to agree to disagree with you: I still think that building horizontally is more useful now.
Time will tell.