Howdy cosmiccrimes! I know what you mean but I am getting more confident all the time. The layoff was a very good thing in the opinion of most of the people I've talked to about it because they were very top heavy and were over paying people and needed to trim down the workers to save a ton of money. 

They are working on ways to make the blockchain more useful and easier to sell to big companies, they aren't really interested in improving steemit and in fact steemit may not last but that won't stop anything as most people are now using esteem or steempeak and those can keep right on going if they dissolve steemit since they operate on the blockchain.

The only thing that matters is if Steem can survive. I think it probably will.