That being said, I’d be curious to hear your take, how do you see the connection between steem and those established chains, and in what way do you think it could bring real value back to Steem?

I think one of the big problems Steem has is economic isolation. It doesn't have broad support on exchanges or access to things like liquidity pools, and I think most people are more hesitant to care about tokens which are a hassle to sell than they are about tokens where there's a potential path to exchange them for something broadly valuable. Plus being isolated makes Steem more vulnerable to weird stuff, such as whatever was happening with the price of SBDs on Upbit for the past few years which is only now correcting, or exchanges arbitrarily enabling or disabling deposits with little explanation.

Personally I think that the only real long-term value strategy is to lean on Steem's unique value proposition -- chasing trends where other projects are already ahead is probably not going to pay off. So in terms of something like games, I think the way to go would be a way to find a way to build on what's different about Steem, not try to make it easier for devs to do the same things here that they do on other chains (of course figuring out what would actually do that is not easy).

A proper Layer 2 inherits tech and consensus from Layer 1

I am not an expert in such things, but I posted this post wondering if using multisig accounts could be a way to have a consensus mechanism that doesn't rely on an independent set of block validators.