It's as good as time as any to list what I thing Steem needs ASAP:

• User/platform configurable rewards distribution: The hardcoded 75%/25% Author/Curators split is something I'd like to see customizable. This ratio should be configurable within the comment_options operation and support between 0/100 and 100/0 ratios. Each Steem powered website could either set this ratio at the platform level or surface the choice to the end user via the interface. Different types of content deserve different types of rewards and by allowing this option to be configurable, it opens Steem up to different opportunities.
• Reimagining Bandwidth and Account Creation: Account creation sucks right now, and while I know HF20 is set to address some of these problems, we very much need a way to create free accounts for people. Free accounts would also imply that the bandwidth system will need adjusting as will the requirements on account creation. This is the biggest hurdle towards adoption in my opinion, I can't really market chainBB to the wider world yet simply because most of them probably won't go through the trouble of creating a Steem blockchain account. I don't have a silver bullet solution for this but it needs to be a top priority.
• A more advanced account/key structure: The account management via keys right now has a lot of blemishes. I believe we need to reimagine the levels of account security and go above and beyond posting and active. A dynamic key system where I could create a key pair and grant it permission to specific operations would be ideal. I want to be able to create a specific key for my price feed and failover, which doesn't have access to transfer my funds out. I'd like to be able to assign a specific key on the powerbot accounts specifically for delegation operations. The more fine control we have over this system, the better types of apps can be built upon Steem. SteemConnect could do amazing things with a key system like this.
• Rethinking content storage: Steem at this rate is going to grow unfathomably large, with a lot of garbage in the blockchain. It's going to need some method of pruning/sharding/subchains/sidechains/something to reduce/divide it's overall footprint. I'm identifying it as a problem, but I don't have a great solution. I just know it'll be an issue in the future if Steem has any sort of monumental growth to it.
• Standardization around content and it's meta: We need standard practices for how different frontends interact with data on the blockchain. Currently each frontend has no respect towards the custom data other platforms are setting within a post. It would go a long ways to have a set of best practices, guidelines and set methods to respect the data between all the platforms being built on the blockchain.
• Beneficiaries Payouts: Currently beneficiary rewards only pay out in SP. These rewards should pay out in whatever method the author of the post chooses (50/50 SBD/SP or 100% SP).

I'm sure I could list more - but I'll stop here :)