It was crippled from the start because to have a decent social media site you need to have people have the ability to choose content they want to see. Steem was never distributed "fairly" from its inception and the majority of it never went to entities that are interested in distributing the voting power outwards. Out of all the "curators" who receive delegations only surpassinggoogle retained his because he actually curated others.

I am assuming that people that care about content and a large userbase are just waiting to see if the scaling issues can be worked out on a technical level, at which point they will fork the project and try to distribute the coins in a sensible manner. And if that fails, just keep trying again and again and hopefully some team with the right know-how will distribute in a sensible manner that allows the platform to flourish.