Very few accountholders are willing to lead. Not many truly have big enough stakes to engage in meaningful development of the kind we have seen with other cryptocurrency coins that have big stakeholder whales. Ideally, witnesses should be funding this as well, but it's hard to expect that with today's low prices. 

Inc owns most of the Steem and positioned itself as the dominant institution. One would think they could develop simple tokens, since they've been working on SMTs for months already. If they do, then many Steem projects would have a way to generate the economic scale they need to expand. Otherwise, there simply isn't enough Steem available for most projects to make things happen.