yes you nailed it there. The problem is this is mainly for bloggers. Bloggers who wants to make money for their blogs.
When a good quality post will only earn a few cents, a non blogger at heart will just quit because they will say spending few hours making a good quality article for a few cents is not worth it. That few hours spending creating blog could be spent somewhere else better.
That is the reason it is hard to get a wider audience because steemit is limited to only bloggers. We might just have to wait until a better version or another site that will actually create or implement a social media functionalities before we invite others.
But that don't mean we stop inviting other to steemit, we never know we might make them a better bloggers than they think they are.
About the investors, people do invest in steem and steemit due to it being the first to couple social media and cryptocurrency and we are looking at it as there is a future for it. It might not running as a bull right now but it might one day when more and more apps and website adapt to its structure and using steem.