When building a software platform, it is very important to have the core functionality working reliably and with enough capacity to handle expected traffic.
It is the same as building a building; the foundation has to be strong enough to support the rest of the structure.
I think it is smart to put the time and effort into this Graphene upgrade at this point in the development of the steemit platform. We are all anxious to see shiny new features but we really should be happy to let the devs get the foundation strongly constructed before building the mansion on top of it that we all want to live in.