To be completely honest, it's hard to have productive conversations on-chain with the tools at our disposal. It's a lot more efficient to use a polished tool like Slack, which in my opinion, is far superior to steemit.com for this purpose.
If we had a Slack-like interface that used Steem to make the conversations public record, I'd be pushing for that.
RE: The recent controversy between Steemit Inc and the community - the premine, control, and where it leads this blockchain