Focusing on rewards that have value is focusing on the major selling point of Steem for now. The reality is that other websites have Steem beat on UI and network effect. This can change with better UI and more users down the road but this is the territory we are in. To hide away Steem's killer feature for adopting new users that have no experience with decentralized smart money platforms would be a mistake.
I'm mostly repeating myself here. I've made these arguments before in my comments when this was first given a serious discussion. https://steemit.com/ned/@krnel/ned-on-sbd-does-the-community-want-to-continue-to-be-paid-out-in-steem-dollars
I'm very well aware of those arguments, I've used them also in the past. But I think it's time to admit that we are not seeing any merchants adopting SBD as a currency. There is no other use besides cryptocurrency speculation and that's not a core business of Steem.
And what I'm saying is that it shouldn't be. Users who come because of money are too low quality to be good early adopters.
Focusing on money has caused some bad publicity and made good people suspicious about the platform. For example: Andreas Antonopoulos and Publicism.