This is an incredible conversation. I haven't been here for all the convo on this from back then that you reference, but it has been my recent thought too. The problem is the metric that makes something worth promoting by the platform. It reflects the community, but chicken or egg?

Is not the community shaping itself around the values the platform promotes for what deserves prominent display? If that metric is how much a post is earning, well then you have everyone focused on getting their posts to earn more than others and quickly. That's the value system of the platform in terms of what it does, not what it says its values are. There are other wonderful values on here, like an economy of kindness and generosity. But we can know the dominant values by what is being highlighted.

As for SMTs, in my limited understanding of them I have mixed feelings. I'm excited about their potential to create mini-steemits that give people interested in a certain topic (or organization/business) a way of doing what we do here on steemit without these issues around having quality content be seen. It won't be decentralized, so probably they will boot any spammers. Or they'll use an algorithm for promoting posts that is something other than trending.

But the technological issues you list make it sound unworkable, at least without jeopardizing what's already going on here. Which points me back to the idea that they are prioritizing what they value. So maybe the values running things around here are more about some objective that has nothing to do with the strength of Steemit in the long run.