Just wanted to share a few words and compare it to another giant out there, although they are hard to compare as they are so different, but many blockchain projects face the same issues of being delayed as they're all experimental tech. I believe a more important aspect to focus on is growth. Even though many blockchains all over the space are declining in growth cause interest usually dies down during these brutal bear markets, here on Steem we've still been seeing a lot of great new projects popping up and we have a lot more active users than we had last bear market. Not only that but there is so much here to do with "proof-of-brain" compared to most others where there's only development and things to do for developers and gambling your coins on trading, etc.
For new readers who may not know much about other blockchains I wanted to talk a little bit about Ethereum, unlike Steem, Ethereum has suffered from some big hacks in the past which has forced the developers to roll back the blockchain which spawned Ethereum classic. Countless of smart-contract hacks since they were not coded correctly and a majority of useless ICO's later and guess what, the blockchain Ethereum is delayed by a lot as well. Ethereum has 4 phases planned, it started out with "Frontier" which was pretty much the pre-sale and a pre-beta of the blockchain and moved on to "Homestead" which it still is on today. The third phase called "Metropolis" was initially planned for early 2017 and yet here we are in late 2018 and it still hasn't arrived. The developers were so sure that they would have deployed Metropolis by now that they implemented an Ethereum mining bomb which makes mining more and more difficult no matter the hashrate. Basically they wanted to reward users and investors for holding Eth as proof of stake more than rewarding the miners for forever so they implemented a mining bomb which at some point would make the difficulty so hard to mine that it would be practically impossible. The idea behind it was to not have the miners fight over rewards with investors and possibly create another fork such as when Bitcoin Cash forked off from Bitcoin.
Here's some more info about the Ethereum Mining Bomb in case you're interested to read more. What I want to say with this though is that some delay is expected, I understand that users and investors and dapp owners are getting frustrated with STM's getting delayed so many times, but I personally believe it won't stop dapps to continue operating the way they have been doing now. I am sure there will come a simplistic form of SMT's at least to get everyone starting and if not from Steemit inc than there are plenty of options out there to implement it differently as to not stagnate development and distribution of the dapps.
Just wanted to share some of this info in retrospect with everyone, there's often some delays in this tech and I imagine the barrier of entry for new developers who are not familiar with this tech is quite difficult and takes time for them to familiarize themselves with.
