I don't agree.

Yes, of course technological progress, the comings SMTs and many new dapps are fascinating, but the core of a social media platform are the people who keep it alive. Without humans the 'social' part is missing, and that's essential:
If I try to convince friends, who are using facebook, to give Steemit (/STEEM) a chance, their answer is NOT
"Oh, no, Steemit is beta only, not comfortable to use, whereas facebook is sooo advanced from a technological point of view."
No, instead of that most of them say:

"All my friends are using facebook, so I need it to stay in touch with all of them!"

The main advantage of facebook are NOT genius programmers or an unbelievable advanced website.
No, instead of that its success is based on the huge amount of people using it! That makes it so difficult to beat facebook.

The STEEM blockchain will only be successful if 'normal' people feel welcomed by friendly humans (not spammers and bots only), if they notice that real humans are reading their posts and upvoting them, if they don't get flagged immediately when making any mistake or even just because of a different opinion, if they don't see bot boosted spam posts dominating the trending page and whales shamelessly exploiting the reward pool.

We should care about the current user base, otherwise (inspite of the technological progress) I am not really optimistic concerning the future of STEEM.

On the one side I like your optimism (also in my eyes STEEM is still fascinating and based on fantastic, creative ideas), on the other side I think the image you paint of the current state of STEEM is somewhat too euphemistic.

P. S.: Here I just noticed another example for the importance of an engaged user base ...