I'm referring to large projects. Smaller projects and communities would of course find SMTs useful and prefer them over cloning. But look at Weku, Golos, Narrative,Whaleshares and there's another one that is picture centric, can't remember the name, but they forked Steem. Its really not that challenging for a business to launch one.
The point I am making is that price of STEEM is going to be directly related to whether people clone or make an SMT, unless Steem's community is so valuable to the business that they go with Steem. Currently, Steem's not big enough of a community for that, but it should be the goal.
Let's say STEEM got back to $1, in that case a video game company wanting to cover RCs for a million people would need at least 15,000,000 SP or rent the RCs. Who wouldn't clone?