I took a break for a while too so I get that. But yeah, I agree with all your points for sure! Steem sure has gone thru the ringer, especially with the bidbots sucking the life out of it. Luckily that is finally changing with the rewards change.

However, I don't know if steemit itself will ever be able to be "fixed". It isn't steemit that will bring the masses, it will be the DApps that ride on top of the steem blockchain, DApps like @actifit, @dtube, @steemhunt, @splinterlands that will bring the masses and they will eventually make it so you never never have to even get on steemit, you will be able to control your wallet and answer messages and write posts in their DApp. Those DApps won't be nearly as confusing as steemit is, they will be user friendly and look professional as well.

According to the whitepaper Steemit was never meant to be the main website, it was more of proof of concept, showing that this idea to pay people for content was feasible. In the future the steemit front end might not even exist, we now have sites like esteem, partiko and steempeak that are much more user friendly and nice to look at... Those will be for the masses.. :0)