It's nice discussion, but IMHO it's a bit too early to present it as a problem. Steemit is currently in beta, in other words a "half baked bread" if you take that bread and try to sell it to your friends, only a few will buy, because only a few know how to bake bread.
What I am saying that, Steemit is too robust at this stage and Isn't quite ready for the average Joe or Jolene to come here and make a easy post as they do on other social media.
Currently it takes knowledge, it takes Markdown with some HTML to format a good post, or raw html, what users don't use on other social media and may seem very complicated. They might don't wanna learn how to use markdown or html just to create a "good" post on Steemit. The point is at this stage we mostly need developers, testers, innovators etc... who will make this half baked product baked so that It can be served to the mass and that will happen when Steemit exits the beta. Truth is, the dev's know about these "problems" and features like easier post writing will be added, profile pictures, uploading photo/video directly etc... that will make someone switching from any other social media platform to Steemit easy. I can't stress this enough but at this stage, we are still pretty much an experiment, as you can see we are changing things from time to time and testing different variables out, take for example the voting power algorithm, which went from 20 to 40 and was proposed to 5 and got rejected by the community. We are still now turning knobs and experimenting to see what works and what doesn't identifying problems as we move on and solve them, for the average user that would be really strange since they are 99% of the time served a fully baked product. Currently most of Steemit users don't know/realize this stuff so how should someone else know, most of the community doesn't even know where to look for info on what is being planned in the future, what are we going to implement next week and etc...
The point is, it's in beta and an experiment that's not finished yet and is not very user friendly atm. I did also introduce Steemit to a few of my friends and one actually came, stayed for 2 days and left... That tells you the current state, but once we have this place nice and shiny I'll bump my friends again and I'm confident that more than just one will join when that happens. :))
The world moves on. Several other blockchain social platforms are being devleoped and launched and the initial momentum from the Steem launch and concept is being lost. I agree with you that more needs to be done (profile pictures, etc.) but it needs to be done soon. An eternal so-called beta phase is a recipe for disaster.
Bingo. The troops have gathered and we're ready to rock... so let's just do this thing already.
Agreed. I prefer to just think of it as a challenge rather than a problem, per se. Something to work on as we develop.
Indeed, that's something we do have to keep in mind as we move forward.