Well, I beg to differ in my opinion about this.
Steem has been and always will be a social decentralized platform, PURE content, where true bloggers can earn. As Ive heard from day 1.
So now, when they have finally done something to the website (it still looks like 3-5 years late, but at least not 20.) I dont think that they will change the marketing strategy.
Steem has been marketed as a blogging platform from day 1.
If we are talking about investors, crypto investors.
Steem is not as rewarding as many other coins which fluctuate from 20-30% per day. So why would I invest? OK long term, but if Im a serious investor, I do my research, I take a look around the web, I see the platform for myself, before investing. And as far as I`ve seen, this is not an investing platform. This is exactly a blogging platform, where you can become a crypto-head from a simple cooking blogger.
I will repeat myself: If a serious investor wants to put money in STEEM, he has two options:

1. • put the investment here and start blogging(investors usually have loads of time to blog) and wait an enormous amount of time to get you ROI back, which is almost a certain red flag for investors as one of the main rules of investing states: "Never put your money in something where you cant get it out in a second."
2. • buy the coin on an exchange and hold it. But by the overall graph of it, it does not seem promising comparing to other coins like stellar or what the heck - LTC.

And what I think (emphases on the I) is that this platform will become HUGE, when they will implement upvoting with pure dollars or btc...
No one cares about a steem coin nowadays, because steem is sooo complicated.
I agree if the marketing strategy wouldve been as you described:
"Steem is a decentralized blockchain with near-instant transaction times and zero transaction fees."
then we would be looking at much different situations.

Just like I cant remember who was it but the statement went:
"If people would really care about transaction speeds or fees, we would see LTC on the top, but the sad truth is that they dont. They just want to make a profit."