Yes STEEM surely is a DAO, so is Bitcoin. But what is STEEM business model? Or as you say: "how wealth is gonna be created"? What makes you think that spawning random dapps clogging the blockchain is somehow going to drive the price up? This is not Ethereum, they are not paying for transactions. More users means more computing costs for witnesses but not more revenue.
The original whitepaper had this covered with the promote function. Burning tokens for content promotion would create buying pressure from advertisers creating a sustainable revenue model. But the promote function was deprecated and now the rewards to posters and curators where does it come from? There is no other income other than speculator investing, and this is not sustainable. Ironically they now want to put ads into steemit's frontend to fund development.