Here is where I don't believe you: when you say you didn't have influence to convince (read my comment below). What you should have done is put in the work while they don't listen, post about it regularly (not more than once a month), and people would naturally gravitate towards your ideas if your work is good. STEEM can get exponentially increasing amounts of contributions from devs as the chain grows.
In my opinion, what would have been better for both Dtube and Steem, would be to accelerate the SMTs development process using your help and implement the features you needed as optional for any SMT. Dtube was the main candidate for an SMT, and SMTs are not necessarily clones of the current version of STEEM, they might have changes in their protocols which are not directly implemented to STEEM coin.