I wonder what would have happened if stablediffusion released itself as a really powerful web-based image editing tool, still offering but relatively de-emphasizing its "create things with a prompt from scratch" functionality.

Realistically, practical use cases are going to be AI+human mix for quite a while anyway.

This feels like where the business will actually go, but I think they didn't want to miss the "wow" factor in a public release.  In the sense that it seems to have captured the imagination of investors, builders and the public - it may turn out to be the right strategy for them, after all.