an interesting thought provoking post! (resteemed and upvoted)
many good points made, especially for Devs. 👏

particularly, among others:

The Consumer audience here is a vital piece of the Ecosystem and one that we tend to not focus on heavily enough as for the most part, there is the concept of paying for the content and return on investment...
Steem has to truly prove itself as a content provider of value...

however a bit clarification: SteemIt doesn't provide Content - it is Authors or Content Creators who provide it. 🙂
and they are quite limited (in RC and SP): to provide more Content they have to have more SP (to have more RC) - means have to Invest. also they have to make their Content visible enough - but they loose that competition to all those who has more SP and can use bots / trails etc. so far it is more like "Re-distribution of Wealth" in this Investment "Ecosystem" 😄

which relates to this your thought:

On Steem, this concept of being paid to view and vote on content is even more incredible if you consider that the 'pay' is coming out of the pool, which is essentially thin air, something from nothing....

correction: not exactly from "thin air" actually, because value for those generated new coins can only be given by more users who Invest more into the project, otherwise ... "nothing remains nothing", i.e. has no value. that's just briefly...