this is cool, you popped up on my feed through a resteem from Hive account@futuremind and I usually am not a big resteem fan but this caught my attention since I am also close to my first steemday myself. My main account is Hive account@felander.
It is nice to see how people that have lasted a year feel about this whole ecosystem.
I also stumbled into this whole thing myself and this was my first crypto experience in a sense, I did not even go through BTC to get here. I got into crypto through steem.
I have the luck to live near Zug, the Crypto Valley in Switzerland and in this year we have set up a successful meetup, are organizing a congress (12/13 of June). All after hours. So in a way steem has changed my life and I am powering up as well.

I also hope this will turn into a fulltime job some how

I really had not thought about losing the meaning of steemit and blogging through SMT that way. I just figured it would stay but become a project on the background and would help social media in the crypto direction.
You have stayed through a lot of changes and as you say, there will be more. Only time will tell if the choice was the good one. But IMO, not choosing anything is the bad one.

I saw you thanked the witnesses at the bottom of your post. I am part of a witness project and I can see that you are still voting for Hive account@idnit even thoug this witness has been offline for 6000+ hours (8+ months)
Any chance you would consider swapping those out for Hive account@swisswitness? we would appreciate the vote