Well, you could, but you're still limited to the capabilities of Steem itself.

Steem itself doesn't actually have a smart contract layer - so you can't write consensus based logic. It's primarily a content (posts) store with voting mechanisms to surface content. 

Currently the platform has ballooned as well, and this article is severely out of data. To run a "full node" on the network now requires something like 270GB of RAM, which can be trimmed down slightly by using some of the filtering options. For example, I built a forum interface on top of Steem ([chainbb.com](https://chainbb.com]), and the Steem API node behind that is currently sitting at 54GB of RAM. 

steem-python and steem-js are the two primarily libraries that most people use at this time to interact with the chain, both available under https://github.com/steemit. 

We have a discord chat running for steem developers, if you're interested in chatting/asking more questions, feel free to join!

https://discord.gg/bU5fYD