I agree with a lot of this, and Hive account@smooth has hit upon the most important point which is that there is no need to conflate the implementation with the presentation. The mechanics of Steem doesn't necessarily need to change in order for the user to see something much simpler.

Steem, Steem Power and Steem Dollars are part of the implementation and are important to how Steem works and manages incentives, but Steemit can be built on top of those without any user ever even hearing the word 'Steem' if it really wanted to.

Steem and the concept of 'locking / locked' steem by the OP is a better idea than 'steem power' and the idea of 'converting' between them. Converting between them makes it feel like you need to understand what the properties are of the two when really Steem Power doesn't really have any properties that you can use. All it does is get you rewards and at some point you can slowly 'unlock' it.

Steem dollars should be called 'dollars'. Everyone understands what a dollar is and there is no need to put 'Steem' in front of it. I understand this may be necessary for development and white paper clarity but its not necessary for the end user. PayPal may refer to balances as 'paypal dollars' in internal documents, but to the end user there is no need to present a balance as anything other 'dollars'.

If a user saw:

• Steem
• Locked Steem
• Dollars

This would be a step up in understandability from where we are now but I think the real issue comes back to off ramps. In an ideal world a user would be able to move money (dollars) in and out of Steem easily (e.g. debit cards and bank withdrawals) and then choose to 'lock' or 'invest' some of those dollars and earn either or both by upvoting and authoring. This is what the mechanics of Steem is ultimately achieving anyway. The UI would then show:

• Invested dollars (gaining rewards)
• Dollars

which anybody could understand without any explanation. Steem devalues by design so there is literally no utility in holding a balance in anything other than (Steem) dollars anyway. In order to do that Steemit would I suppose need to become an exchange or just operate more like a normal company. Given the above it does make me wonder what the cryptocurrency aspect of Steem is bringing. I suppose the answer to that is that Steemit is incapable of at some point turning round and screwing you because the mechanics are part of the blockchain, not part of what the company says it will do, plus regulatory hurdles with investing likely precludes a normal company from operating this way.

The closer we can get to this point the better though and in the absence of a dollar off-ramp the whitepaper talks about merchants and having them accept Steem. I think this is unnecessary. A lot of people have at this point heard of Bitcoin and know that they can at least use that in some stores and probably a lot of people would like to own some bitcoin, particularly if it cost them nothing. Steemit could operate as a pure Steem / Bitcoin exchange without all the regulatory issues that adding USD to the mix brings by allowing people to withdraw their 'dollar' balance as bitcoin and then the bitcoin community is doing all the heavy lifting of progressing towards much better on and off ramps. They can spend those Bitcoins today or take them to any cryptocurrency exchange including the most reputable ones and easiest to use ones. Direct bitcoin deposits would also be useful but much less so since, although easily earning and owning bitcoin might be attractive to the average user buying it is still an unnattractive obstacle course at the moment. This would allow the UI to have two balances:

• Invested dollars (will change with Steem network value, and gain rewards)
• Dollars

and to have a button

• Withdraw as bicoin (maybe with a list of shops you can spend your bitcoin at and exchanges where you can convert your dollars to bitcoin)

with the ideal one day being a couple more buttons

• Invest dollars (i.e. buy Steem and convert to Steem Power)
• Withdraw dollars to a bank account

There's nothing wrong with liking Steem and understand and appreciating its mechanics but also presenting it in such a way that a billion people can understand it without any explanation.

Aside from the currency issue I think the other UI improvements like a better editor are critical for success but its worth noting that development takes time.

Lastly I think its also very important to bring in external revenue from advertising or other sources. Maybe I'm wrong but it seems obvious to me that if the only source of money in Steem is the dollars that people invest getting shifted around then for everyone gaining some other investors somewhere are losing which isn't ideal. Its OK for starting up as people see the potential and the pot is growing but in the longer term it would make a lot of sense for Steemit to advertise and use that revenue to just buy Steem, and then either distribute that to each account proportional to what it already holds or just destroy them. Advertising revenue would then just automatically go to all users of Steem and their USD values of their balances would increase proportionally.