One thing I have posted about that you mention here, is that with sufficient capital, Steemit can be completely controlled.

There are entities with sufficient capital to purchase nominal Steem to completely control the witnesses, which in turn allows control of the code that Steemit runs on. I believe this was not unknown to the devs, although the only evidence of this is that they're smart people, and it's an obvious feature of the weighting of VP by SP.

If some RL whale buys enough stake to do this, the devs retire rich. If it doesn't happen, Steemit keeps growing and becoming more relevant - until it does happen. It may not be a get rich quick scheme, but as long as Steemit doesn't fail for some other reason, it is a get rich for sure scheme.