Thanks for your insights here. I think it's important to have an SMT architecture in place as steem is providing a real world use case to many for the first time. Having the same tools as other platforms will encourage people to stay on steem and therefore cement its first mover advantage. Whatever replaces steem will need to be 10x better than steem. However the platforms that are building on top of steem already have demonstrated that value is value is value; Utopian.io already has a moderator system, looking around the platform I can see a nearly limitless infrastructure for building anything we can imagine already. The trouble areas here of course are privacy, as anything posted without encryption is public forever, and smart contracts.
Inventory control, internal POS, virtual reality, and rich media are all coming. I truly believe the attention market/brain paradigm on steem will encourage people to spend their time here. Politics, knowledge, science, art, news, sports, games, gambling, shopping, and even memes... anything that is public or is done in public has a place here.
Imagine autonomous cars you hail by posting on a "d-uber" platform; it requires a 100% upvote, and it's platforms wallet also upvotes the ride. Bringing tangible value to its users, and funding the cost through inflation that then gives steem another defining edge outside of exchanges and in real world commodities.
SMT may have it's uses, I'm glad it's coming, it may also provide more market edges for price discovery; but the innovation already present is mind boggling.