Opinions certainly differ on priorities (not everyone thinks SBD is that important; some do, some don't), but the reality is that there are limited development resources and the SMT work is just about done, so the focus is on getting that finalized and deployed rather than jumping around from one priority to another and never finishing or deploying anything.

Also, understand that @sbdpotato may seem frustratingly slow, but bear in mind that before @thecryptodrive took the initiative to start it, nothing at all was being done. I'll take something (slow) over nothing any day.

Finally, @sbdpotato has a self-accelerating effect since each day's rewards add to the available funds to be used for conversions every 3.5 days. So what I expect to happen is that it appears to be doing not much until the available funds reach some critical threshold (relative to existing market supply and demand), and then SBD movement up to or near $1 may then happen pretty fast.

I don't know when that might be though.