but you can't drive the sort of traffic needed to become a top-250 site on the promise "this is a great place to develop an app!"

Unlikely, although I wouldn't discount that it could be a possibility. With currency, the game is not as straight-forward as content sites like medium and aeon.co, but I guess anyone able to solve this will likely solve one of the biggest "problems" the steem ecosystem has.

And then there are all these really worthy apps-- but why can't we drop them into a sort of "frame" so the user home page has buttons/links to Dtube, Zappl, Dsound, Steepshot-- to not only increase EASE OF USE, but to create some "cross-pollination?"

I think plenty of these lack-of-hub problems will be solved with the upcoming steemconnect dashboard, for discovery, identity, etc.

Encourage Manual Curation Whether we need to go back to 50/50 rewards or not, I'm not sure. But something needs to be done to encourage interaction and engagement... to make it more attractive than automation and bots.

Agreed. Curation activity should be promoted by supporting and replicating the @curie model, imo.

On self-upvoting: a simple solution-- you're welcome to self-upvote, but self upvoting drains your voting power 5x faster than voting for someone else. On Upvote bots: don't outlaw them; simply CLEARLY label any post with a purchased vote "Promoted Content" or "Sponsored content" just like other social media sites do.

Don't think the act against self-upvoting is necessary, especially after changing the rewards-curve. As for bots, I'm right with you, there's just no way to outlaw or ban them anyway. Labelling makes sense.

By and large, community and interactions are what makes it stick, although we do need to encourage quality posts, especially those voted up into trending or find themselves in that position (either by buying votes or otherwise). It's a public shared space that represents the platform (and hopefully also reflective of the best it has to offer), so anyone there ought to step up and make it look good and participate socially for the rest.