General public on-boarding could care less about the 'chain' through explorers. When the flagship front-end allow censorship and rampant abuse of stake to silence people that is what they see.

Ned got called out for it when he was interviewed by Bloomberg. They saw it, enough to bring it up on live tv.

He went so far as to say in one of his "guitar videos" that he never intended this to be "censorship resistant".

A ton of communities and Apps that could have been built on STEEM and integrated into Steemit have left and launched their own chains or Apps on other chains.

It is what it is.