I wasn't here during the golden days, but I can't see Steemit just as a vertical, hosting only cryptocurrencies content. I think the potential for this project is to become a defacto platform for building endless "verticals". The building stage may be painful, but once it takes off, it has the potential to disrupt social media.
I do not believe the comment upthread (from another commenter) was suggesting that the platform should ever remain a crytpocurrency-focused platform. It as suggested a natural focus where high level talent was readily available, and a starting point where we could build a strong platform and expand from there (perhaps into finance or technology other naturally-related areas, and then iteratively outward).
I was here and frankly the quality of some of the crypto stuff that was getting posted far eclipses most if not all of the "new undiscovered" authors who are being promoted by these guilds. In my guild we actually looked for extremely high quality posts and authors (people on the order of @skypilot or @neilstrauss for example, both of whom we discovered). These mass-voting guilds making 150+ votes per day seem to be more of a way to just give away a tiny bit of money to a lot of users for usually little significant lasting value in terms of content or overall platform social media strength, and as others have noted, often little to no engagement.
For a long time one of the early crypto posts was the single highest traffic way that people found the site by organic web search. We will never get that without focus that draws the true elite content and authors within niches where we are strong enough to gains some sort of critical mass of both authors as readers, as we had done with crypto. Shotgunning it is doing little for us. The growth statistics tell the story; there isn't any.
All of this assumes the site aspires to be a content-driven platform like Medium or potentially even reddit and less of a social-focused platform like Facebook where people communicate with their friends but it is more about interaction than "content". Given the technology that exists today and the lack of any credible social platform features, the content-focus seems far more viable.
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.