1000s of users who afaik supply the vast majority of the data for the Steem blockchain were not transacting because the shit was down. I do not understand why that is so difficult for people to appreciate.
I don't disagree on that point, as I said it was an important application (or part of the "system" if you want to call it that) that was down.
Again it was apparently not the websites which were non-functional as the web pages were loading. Yet it was the data from the ledger which was not being served. Now you claim these servers/nodes which supply the data from the blockchain to these sites is not part of the blockchain. That is your definition. There is no conspicuous official documentation I have ever seen which makes all of these definitions you are claiming to be the official ones. Heck there is not even a proper whitepaper for the DPoS blockchain. It is not even clear if there is any funding and economic model for these nodes/servers which are suppose to provide the data from the blockchain to the front-end sites.
You are right on this point and it relates to EOS (and competitors such Ethereum) as well in the sense that no one has really explained how these so-called dapps are supposed to work, how they are hosted, etc. IMO this is largely because the capital driving it all does not really care about all that beyond the minimum necessary to sell some sizzle and just wants to trade tokens. Vague claims about 'world computer' and '100k tps' (hasn't Dan been selling that same line since BTS where it was just as meaningless and has not and never will be delivered?) are enough to do that.