That's pretty much exactly what I think..

Now the steem community needs to step up and basically grow up to really become decentralized.

would the community really step up and fill the gap which the departure of Steemit and its development team would result in? I doubt it. Also, we would lack money to finance strong API nodes, which are capable of handling the traffic. Who would operate these?

It's in our hands.
We need to self organize.. in a decentralized manner.. with the objective to somehow safe steem.
After that we can build on top of it.
Otherwise we risk loosing it..

@tipu curate