Excellent articles ; these are all issues which need to be addressed. I think there are applications (such as APPICS) which are waiting for the SMT's and have already done their ICOs and will drive demand for steem holding STEEM to obtain blockchain bandwith . You could argue that we should encourage Steem social apps directly on the blockchain but I think these problems you mention are too vested in the establishment to change and this will see ultimately STEEM becoming a blockchain bandwidth provision service (pay to play - ie hold steem to get RC's) with the social side of it implemented in layers on top using SMT's which have different rules. Is this all bad? Not really. It will drive apps to hold steem to obtain RC's for their users. They can run their own business models on their SMT's which will succeed or fail based on their ability to draw money into the system.
I would love to get your take on what it happening with Share2Steem at the moment also?