Maybe the curve just seems overkill now with the low price, low activity. But it's still doing its job, including helping out with downvote fatigue and forcing abuse up to at least a couple of bucks instead of farming cents. It'll be much more obvious in its effectiveness when Steem has high price, high activity (and maybe low powered voting will feel less of a pinch).
Btw I think moving the current Steem (and its inflation) to an SMT is probably not the best play in the near future. Exchange listing issue + secondary tokens rarely take off + barely any demand for Steem as a bandwidth token (and my as well be using normal platforms if the reward pool is not the primary thing really). I believe getting posting/voting incentives right is our main competitive edge, although it remains to be seen if it can actually work well, especially after UI, curation tools etc mature. It's a meme by now, but I think "Communities" will help a lot.
As smooth mentioned elsewhere, one main reason why SBD is failing is likely simply because of Steem's declining value. I used to think its better to get rid of it, but a native stablecoin is probably important for mass adoption. Still seeing the face appeal of just one Steem token though.
Exchange listings are far less needed because SMTs include a very efficient internal market and can always be traded for STEEM.
If that were the case there would be barely any demand for Steem today at all. Well, there actually isn't, unfortunately, but distributing a lot of it for free that many people dump either quickly or slowly would seem to only make matters worse.
In fact, most demand for all cryptos is probably speculative, that includes speculation on future demand (such as future demand for a bandwidth token should usage take off) as well as simply speculation on shorter-term supply and demand factors, which again would seem to be helped not hurt by better scarcity and less of it being printed and given away.
The main negative I could see would be less distribution and less potential bootstrapping of Steem (in both STEEM and SBD forms) as a future currency among Steem users, which could give it large future demand. But on the other side of that is demand for STEEM as a reserve currency for SMTs, and the fact that people can trade some or all of their SMTs for Steem which might still help with distribution.
While it does what you describe, at the same time it empowers big abusers as high power circles and self voting whales - of which we still have quite a few who nobody takes care of. On the backs of the majority of small and new creators.
As I said before, cent vote farms should be approached by blockchain analysis, not with an approach that hurts honest cent voters.
About SMT replacing the steem pool I have no strong opinion, I can see positives, but your remarks have some validity too. I don't see external exchange listings as too critical because of the option to convert internally and use steem for on-/offramping, and the demand for a bandwidth token can not be evaluated before SMT are live. But I certainly agree that it should not be a short term priority, we need to see how SMT are accepted first.
Regarding the stablecoin I disagree. But I also still value my holdings in BTC instead of fiat, and want crypto to replace it ;)
I don't see the curve empowering big abusers and self-voting whales, they already have high power regardless. Any effect of the curve on them is negligible (few percent maybe).
The positives and negatives on small accounts and small votes are more debatable but this doesn't seem to be a large stake circle/whale issue at all.
I did a round of tests, and the results for when the threshold is reached are indeed lower than my subjective impression so far. A few percent of a high vote still translate in quite a lot of small votes, and when they had higher values the bigger ones would go down some more than the curve effect boosts them right now. It's still just a few percent, but that doesn't invalidate that it's on the back of the small ones.
My focus certainly is on the lower end, where it has the big impact.