The future may well be distributed systems. A large number of coders have believed it for over the last decade. We can't get caught up on one technology though. Years ago we would have thought torrents were the future of distributed file sharing. Spoiler Alert: They're not. They're just another piece of tech that was actually a pretty big advancement in certain aspects, but was still just a step towards the future. Maybe more like a landing on a staircase.

Steem is a significant advancement in many ways. Maybe, if by some miracle, we got a bunch of coders that actually make some major developments in working towards fixing this place...then maybe Steem might be a huge part of the future...otherwise...this place will just be somewhere with huge dreams controlled by idiots with too much money.

As to the specifics in regards to nodes...I think we'd have to figure out a way to make nano-nodes made with smart phones and tablets and netbooks, as well as other less powerful computers. Maybe have another type of node to run on standard home computers, and then yet another for full nodes. Then we could pay all the people involved in this with some kind of token.