With mining it is always risky, especially if you mine something new and not yet established...
However Steem is being mined with CPU and not with GPUs, there are not that many altcoins you can mine with your processor that are very valuable, so if you have some spare CPU power you can dedicate it to Steem mining... that is if you want to be a part of the community.
If you are mining with GPUs, then mining Ethereum or any other profitable coin ta the moment and then exchanging it for Steem is of course also an option.
If you want to mine with CPUs Monaro would make more profit than Steem and remember you are mining Steem but getting paid in Steem Power, that is the big red flag to me.
Imagine if you were offered two jobs, one paid you weekly an amount that may vary but you can spend straight away and another that would not pay you for your work for two years and then it could be pretty much any amount of money not at all related to the work done and force you to do extra work to not actually lose money.
Which job would you take? My computer says 'A bird in the hand is worth the promise of two sometime in the future in a bush that has just been planted' and refuses to mine STEEM.