I think the saloon needs to be the focal point of the SN experience.
I've come to a similar conclusion -- the Saloon is like nowhere else. It really is a different kind of thing. Now I'm wondering: what to do with that insight?
The closest to inspiration I have is this thing I use, LogSeq, which is a graph-style PKM tool. (Heads up, @Coyote_Cosmico, may interest you.) There's a lot of takes on bi-directional linking PKM tools, but LogSeq was one of the first to organize around the daily journal. It would take too long to explain this, but I think of the Saloon kind of like the daily journal, a way to provide an overarching but organic structure to the community. It already sort of does that, by accident. I'm wondering if it could do it even more.
But I think in the wild west phase we have gotten far too many territories to start and many power users are focused on their own territories (I am guilty as charged) rather than floating around, weaving in and out of posts, comment threads, having the great and random collisions that made SN so magical.
I haven't made good on this yet, but I got a territory for two reasons:
  1. to support SN, as a kind of donation
  2. to be a total dictator and use the SN tools to make my own little kingdom with stuff I think is awesome, and find my tribe, which overlaps somewhat w/ btc but is not identical to it
I think that even if a territory isn't revenue-generating, it could still be really nice as a product for the second case, for the same reasons SN is awesome: if you have real monetary incentives, you can solve a whole bunch of problems with social media, or even just media.
Inasmuch as we're still very early to btc, we're even earlier to SN and what it makes possible. So I'm not sweating these teething months at all.