creating utility and liquidity for STEEM would be much more valuable than SBD imho
That was a reasonable view 3-4 years ago, but the market has moved on from that to more of a focus on stable coins, and for good reasons. Volatile tokens don't make for good medium of exchange, unit of account, or store of value (the last is debatable, if one is willing to take a long term point of view).
There just isn't much utility to be had from volatile tokens other than speculating or longer term investing in the platform.
This is one way Steem was actually ahead of its time, but has lost some of that lead by failing to push ahead with development to improve and strengthen SBD.
I think getting rid of SBD (without replacing it with something similar) would be a huge error for Steem, but I could get behind the idea of simplifying between STEEM and SP.
The problem with SBD though is that it is only pegged to prevent it going down. We need a mechanism that inflates SBDs when they are above 1$ and sells them to buy STEEM, which is then burned.
Otherwise we will go through endless loops of speculation on that token, and it won't ever serve its purpose of stable coin.
Technically we don't really know to what extent the extraordinary events of late 2017, where we saw large and sustained overvaluation of SBD, would ever recur. So far we have not. There are already some improvements to SBD since then: 1) printing does not slow and stop at the very low 2-5% ratio any more, and b) SPS offers a large-ish ready supply of SBD which can be introduced into circulation by stakeholder vote (one way would be using SBD from SPS to buy STEEM and then burn it, as you stated, though this is still limited by the supply in the SPS treasury).
That being said, I also agree we should improve SBD. One way to do this is by further leveraging SPS: https://steemit.com/steem/@smooth/steem-improvement-proposal-allow-steem-donations-to-the-dao