YES!! This is very true and a huge part of why I was willing to help with the project because I got the sense that Steemit INC wasn't just willing to have others create applications (including front end's) on their system but I believed they were secretly Hoping that a group would come in and make something better.
The company constantly delegates large amounts to projects including other Front Ends. I see it as proof they do not see other front ends as competition. I think they may even be happier if they didn't have to put ANY resources or programmers on the task of front end development. It's a testament that they really do want the market to speak and act.
Also where their hands can be tied or they'd cause issues if they made changes it's easy for a small project like SteemPeak to come in and to just decide to solve everything and because at first there are no users no one is gonna get upset and then when we create a ton of needed features then people can choose to come here. something like SteemPeak can make decisions that steemit inc would have trouble doing in order to stay partial.