This is an excellent point @pfunk our UI teem tries hard, but at the end of the day the steemit ui is being created by programmers and not Designers. I remember back when steemit first open sourced the code there were some attempts by a guy from brazil to produce a "Medium style ui" on top of steemit. I don't know whatever happened with that effort, but it looked slick.

If medium just used steem as a backend, they could dramatically cut their own costs and I'm fairly certain there is enough talent to make that look and work slick.