Once the issue of Steem blockchain being treated as an ATM comes to mind after reading this post. Although we have an endemic of shortsighted value extracting accounts here but the fact that total SP has increased over the time period is quite an encouraging factor.

You mention that SMT might actually out preform Steem and I agree that it might not necessarily be a bad thing if we achieve an underlying stability within the ecosystem. This way the whats built on top of it can be even more lucrative.