Management is holding back adoption of Steemit.
In the early battles of the censorship wars, Steemit seemed to come up often enough as an alternative to the censored corporate platforms. Now? Not so much. Not that Steemit was doing any outreach at the time. It was simply word of mouth.
Since then, I've seen minds.com come up way more often. Why? Minds management is actively recruiting those kicked off Facebook, Twitter, et al to come join MInds. Steemit has zero outreach to those censored elsewhere, as far as I can tell.
And related to your last point above, minds has posting rules similar to Facebook. If you understand Facebook, it's not a big learning curve to understand minds. Plus minds has a lot less of that "do this, don't do that" mentality of Steemit. Which is also a form of censorship, IMHO. Plus you'll never get your reputation knocked to pieces because some whale decides he/she just ain't too fond of you.
Is minds a much better alternative? Can't say right now, because they have some issues of their own. But if minds keeps recruiting the top talent censored elsewhere, their issues will be much more easily overlooked.
Plus you can earn crypto at minds.com too.
On Edit: The big issue at minds is it's still thin on content. Much thinner that Steemit. But Steemit sitting back on their asses assuming things will always be that way is not a winning strategy.
RE: What is holding back Steem from mainstream adoption? (in my opinion)