Actually, SBD makes things more simple. It lets you ignore the fluctuations, even when they're downwards, except for certain limits like when there's a currency crisis.
Say a user earns $50 SBD two months ago and the price of STEEM drops 50%. Then they remember they had that $50 and they convert it to STEEM. Unlike other cryptocurrencies, the $50 they forgot about will still be $50 by the time they remember (for better or worse).
I think, if we want to make it even more simple, we could let users set up their own policy, then give them a default policy. The default policy is how it works right now. If a user wants, they can set up an additional policy that will, say, automatically convert SBD to STEEM under certain conditions.
Simple yes, it reflects dollars directly. Then you exchange for that amount of BTC. Or, you exchange STEEM for BTC, same things, it's just STEEM doesnt show US dollar value automatically. That's the major attractor for the SBD. The benefit of STEEM is that if the price does go up, then you can sell for more, while SBD holding give you nothing.
There is no reason that SBD couldn't be exchanged directly with USD (or EUR other relatively stable fiat) and paid directly to a bank account. There just don't happen to be exchanges offering that service right now, but it is inevitable if the platform were to grow enough that would happen. In fact some exchanges were already considering it months ago but have apparently backed away as Steem as a whole has cratered.
So, I get what @ned is saying. The community could decide that SBD is no longer needed since STEEM has less dilution than it did. The flexibility of the platform allows for this kind of agility. And historically, we've only seen STEEM fall in value, so SBD was critical for casual content creators. In that context, no one could argue against its utility.
But ultimately, I'd like to see SBD stick around as a speculative instrument for both long and short term uses.
The way I look at it nobody is looking at the long-term. Ok, so SBD might delute the value of Steem in general ,but someday that won't be the case so we'll yank away the one thing that non-crypto users could make sense of , all because we are here for the money I guess ??
That's rather simplistic of an argument to make that it's "all about the money", which can simply be thrown back to the SBD supporting as wanting the monetary transfer simplicity, so it's all about the money there as well. When looking at other currencies, 1$CAD is not 1$USD, nor is 1Pound. 1 STEEM is different too. Conversions can be looked at in terms of another currency, which is what people do to make everything weighed on the same scale. So you can covert STEEM, to any currency value representation, like USD, and have that value represented, rather than another token valued at a near $1 value... the extra bit of another token just to have a direct constant value... is for simple thinking. Currencies int he world don;t work like that, they fluctuate, which is what STEEM does. SBD does not really (yes minor changes to try to stabilize it), it stays pegged to the US dollar.