If it was such a success, why do you think the "experiment" was discontinued?

The STEEM blockchain is for all intents and purposes controlled by Steemit Inc. They implement whatever changes they want, moderate/censor their front-end, and control almost all the coding that is merged. Only in the last month did they start merging community code requests, but really nobody knows how many of the anonymous developer, marketing, and witness accounts they actually control on here.