New Steemit wallet likely to drive people away?

We've now had the split between the general Steemit site and the wallet for a while, so it's time to look at the consequences. According to various posts by Hive account@steemitblog this was to optimise site performance and potentially improved security. Separating the parts that need more than the posting key could have benefits, but I expect a lot of users are confused.

At first there was not even a link from the wallet back to Steemit and it opens on a separate tab, so users may find themselves a little lost.

You have to log in with your active key to do anything here. You cannot even claim rewards otherwise, which you could do before with your posting key. I use the Steem Plus extension that adds a Delegate button, but that only appears when logged in and you need to log into Steem Connect anyway to complete the transaction. Steemit really need to add delegation functionality as it's really useful. It also seems that you get logged out after any transaction. I use Lastpass to fill in credentials, but it's still a 'bit of a faff', as we say here.

I do not have the answers on what the ideal design is, but I hope this is still being reviewed based on user feedback.

For now I tend to claim my rewards using Hive account@partiko as that does not require extra logging in.

For non-English speakers or will be even more confusing. They make free concessions for them. Note that Busy has been multilingual for some time.

As for the new ads, I've seen some rants about that, especially by Hive account@arseniclullaby. I can appreciate that Steemit need income, but when you're users are used to no ads you have to be careful not to spoil their experience. I'm not blocking ads on the site and they are not too terrible generally. We can use ad blockers or you can just use another dapp such as Busy, eSteem, Partiko or Steempeak. I wonder if any of those will resort to ads to make their business work. Some do take a cut of post rewards.

Steemit is still considered a beta, after 3 years. I have to wonder when it go beyond that. The userbase is still pretty small, but it needs to be better if they expect millions.