I just finished watching Ned's live stream, and I wanted to unpack what I got out of it.
Since they called it a test, I won't spend much time critiquing the overall presentation (smile more, look the audience in the eye by looking at the camera, let the production team do their job without micro-managing, run tests beforehand to remove background noise, don't schedule when you have a flight to catch, answer more than 3 peoples' questions in an hour, etc). Instead, I will focus on what was said and what I think it could mean.
For my thoughts before the stream, see my previous post: Will Steemit, Inc's Struggles Lead to Steem's Decentralized Success?.
Ned seemed to indicate the original goal of Steemit was distribution of currency and becoming one of the best blockchain development companies out there. In a sense, this would imply that Steemit.com was never originally intended to be anything more than a fancy cryptocurrency faucet. Later, he said, the ideas of 1) censorship resistant social media and 2) fairly rewarding content creators based on the quality of their work were added later. In this sense, we expanded the scope of what Steem was originally trying to do in a potentially unsustainable way.
Where does last year's goal of "tokenizing the web" shared at Steemfest2 fit in? I'm not really sure.
He called these expanded scopes "false narratives" and not part of the original plan. He did say:
"Steemit.com a good flame for showing the world how to get cryptocurrency in the hands of a lot of people."
He didn't give a clear "SMTs are completely on hold" statement, but said things like they are "being discussed" and called them a "thriving thing" while they are currently focused on surviving.
As part of that survival and cutting costs, there's talk of moving to the RocksDB implementation which should reduce the cost of running full nodes allowing more people in the community including witnesses and application developers to use, operate, and maintain their own nodes. This will most likely take many months to complete. Thankfully, he also said the core blockchain developers that were with the company last week are still here today. That, to me, was one of the most important things to hear.
Unfortunately, my questions posted here were not addressed. I appreciate the responses given to Tim, Smooth, and Noisy, though they did seem a bit vague. I didn't hear a clear direction as much as a "Yeah, we're looking at all the options available to us" which I guess is fair enough.
Overall, my perspective is unchanged from my previous post. I think the future for the Steem blockchain is more decentralization and community ownership/responsibility. For that to happen, we'll need governance mechanisms to handle community funds to pay for services and developers the blockchain needs. I'm hoping the work I and others have been putting into creating 
I think the future for Steem is a decentralized community owned and operated by the members who give it value. I think it will get there by points of centralization becoming less important. That includes Steemit, Inc and the main API node cluster they currently run on behalf of the community.
Maybe the future is less about a centralized website (steemit, busy, steempeak) and more about decentralized clients like eSteem Surfer? I saw the latest while at Steemfest3, and I just downloaded it today. It seems to work great!
In fact, I'm using eSteem Surfer to create this post.
We're at a crossroads as a community. Are we going to take responsibly (including the costs) of maintaining and developing this blockchain? Do we have the skills and resources required to accomplish this? Can we move away from relying on central points of failure like Steemit.com or the Steemit, Inc APIs?
Time will tell. If the goal is a fully-decentralized blockchain community, then we may be moving in the right direction with less focus on one company.
Still though, I would like to have my questions answered to better understand the role Steemit, Inc (and their stake of Steem Power) will play in the future.
