Yes, the currency aspects of Steem are woefully underrepresented. We are led to believe that marketing will wait till SMTs are ready, but EOS (based on the Steem codebase as we all know) is worth $5 billion without a working blockchain... I don't see a single top witness doing anything to market Steem to the broad world, either. They are certainly paid adequately to collaborate and launch some serious initiatives.
A bigger issue, though, is Bittrex is the only major exchange Steem is reliably listed on. The trendy exchanges like Binance and other East Asian exchanges is where all the pumpers are at currently.
I have no doubt that they will pump Steem at some point, like every other shitcoin, but yes - Steem is indeed traditionally a laggard.
We were also told that they wanted to wait on marketing until sign-ups were better...until the economics were improved, until...
There's always an excuse to not promote/market Steem and/or Steemit. And as you've said, EOS is already getting much more exposure and much more attention without even having a working product. If there's one thing that crypto markets have proven, it's that you don't need to wait in order to market and to draw in money.
So, we're still left wondering...what exactly is the problem here? The blockchain is going on two years of actual existence and functionality and is one of the best blockchains in existence in terms of performance and desired features (particularly speed and costs). The excuse that "Steem is just too new" doesn't exactly hold up. Plenty of newer blockchains and tokens get far more interest and investment. Steem still lags compared to them as well, despite having more users, developers, and actual use.