Sorry but can't agree with the article. You mentioned some good points worth discussing, but the main idea "we may not need ethereum because we have steem" is somewhat off. Especially since you are comparing two very different projects with different goals.

First of all, I must admit that I have participated in DAO experiment, and sold my tokens (with a big discount unfortunately) before hard fork was voted on. I even participated in an eth pool mining so you can't consider me as a "dispassionate bystander". But I have been watching crypto sphere for quite some time and I was investing in a few coins before ethereum was even born. Now I participate on steem project and if something better rise up, I won't hesitate a second to join in.

But back to the article - we can say that DAO was some sort of a flagship of ethereum for some time and a huge success until the hack. You don't see 155M projects raising very often , even less so in crypto sphere. DAO itself held almost the same capitalisation as steem holds now. It was supposed to be an ultimate investing vehicle but due to flaws in the code it ended as a disaster. I don't blame eth developenet team to support hard fork, in the end it was the community that decided the next course of action, and this community must now bear the consequences (ETC split and lost some portion of supporters). But consider this - DAO accident would break almost any altcoin in the cryptosphere, yet ethereum is still here and there are still plenty of projects being developed on this platform. I see no reason why to regard ethereum as a failed platform. Do you think DAO was the only project active on it? What about DixigDAO, or Maker? They are too "DAO"s you know, and I haven't heared that they are negatively impacted by the incident. The original Ethereum proposition "To allow developers and entrepreneurs to create decentralized and autonomous services based on the Ethereum blockchain." is still here. In contrary to your belief I think that ethereum now is even more valued by potential developers due to two facts:

• all their creation can run on two platforms now (eth and etc)
• community is acting quickly (compared to bitcoin its a speed of light), can make a decision (even if some minority is not happy about the outcome) and are acting in a demogratic way. the pure decentralised way (note how a vote was processed)

Steem on the other hand is still young, has limited itself to a socialization site and any possible bugs are still to be found. You are right in one thing though - that "if the steemit devs had tried to build their project on ethereum, they would have been limited by infrastructure problems that they would not be able to respond directly". Any project of such proportions would better off on their own I guess.