I agree. one of the major problems we have on Steem is the lack of development on here. Of course, over the past few months, a lot have changed and we've seen more people working on developing things. But, we could be better. Way better.

One of the problems with getting more dapps on Steem at the moment is the lack of tokens. For so long, some initiatives have had to work without a good means of incentivizing their users and it's slowed down their adoption and progress. And Judging by how easy it was for Hive account@shredz7 to build a side chain (state of steem) and then build a dapp Stratos for communities, it's very correct to say our biggest stakeholder and developer company Steemit is incompetent through and through. How do you develop a fine technology such as Steem and then sunset it at its peak? It's been over 2 years and a team of over 12 programmers couldn't figure out how to give the chain tokens and yet someone singlehandedly did it in a few months. Today, through State of Steem, we've been able to build tokens with Steem Engine, which is awesome. i hope more developments can kick off from there.

Still is no match for a place like EOS even though we've got a great community going. Like you've said, we need Hackathons and reward incentives to attract more top developer teams here. And the ways i see that happening is either if

• Independent communities fund them;
• Witnesses come together fund them;
• Steemit Inc fund them (like Block.one did at the start).

However, i do not advocate for dependence on Steemit inc. For me, they do not seem to think long-term enough to want to throw money around for that. So, i do hope the other two options are good enough (there could be better options though).

In all, i do see a beacon of hope for the chain with Steem Alliance (which i think is too slow and without clear purposes or form yet), Hive account@shredz7's State of Steem, Stratos for communities (Hive account@stratos), Steem Engine, and the SPS being developed by Hive account@blocktrades. And i hope with these things in place, more useful developments start popping up. I also hope i can join in developing for the chain too. Someday!