I believe projects like SBI will greatly benefit from communities and SMTs. The Steem you get from curation rewards, no one can take that out of your account. You can always back an SMT with liquid Steem from CR rewards. That is just one possibility.

Steem downvotes are actually a very necessary part of Steem to curb abuse as much as possible. Steem is not only a bandwidth token but a governance token as well. This type of token is best spread among new users far and wide.

I think of Steem as version 1.0 - with SMT/Communities being 2.0