Steem is overcomplicated, but there ways to get people on board quickly, eg create an account with RCs and delegate to them. The token based does like palnet are interesting as they hide a lot of the spammy, over promoted posts. Having them for specialist interests like sport or finance may bring in more people. It is not too hard to earn those tokens and gain some influence there. Probably easier than with just with Steem.

Steemit have failed us on SMTs. Maybe they have potential, but it's just been too long.