They're not diverting dev effort and delaying SMTs or Communities for this, as stated. However I myself do believe it's of paramount importance:
Imagine how good SMTs or Communites would have to be in order to turn this place around if our economic incentives continue to force people to spam, self vote and sell votes. Realistically, what are the chances of Steem based SMTs taking off to the point where they're not just successful themselves but can carry the failure of the entire ecosystem when Steem is spirally down in CMC charts and Steemit is dropping Alexa ranks because there truly isn't any reason to be on a platform whose front page is a dumpster. SMTs and Communities would need to be impossibly, unfathomably good.
Now imagine how good a more reasonable economic system would only need to be to fix this. It just has to make an intelligent attempt at aligning better rewards with behavior we want, such as people to actually vote based on their subject opinion of a contents appeal. The answer is economic reform just has to be sensible. This is by far the most important and most cost effective change we can make.
It'll only be a small exaggeration to say that @Vandeberg could probably bash out a pretty sound economic system in an afternoon (maybe a week). Yet this would be the one change that would totally turn this place around. Not only that, a functioning content discovery and rewards system would greatly magnify the value of all the other initiatives. SMTs, Communities, Marketing. They won't get us far if our core value proposition is the one thing we're failing the hardest at.
I didn't think they were, I still think it should not be done now. Apart from the reasons mentioned that I think this should all be done at the SMT level within communities, I do not support a free downvote pool in any way. There is no chance it will be used responsible or reasonably. Bullies will downvote people they don't like day in and day out, because they can. This line of thinking is fundamentally flawed overall because people don't want to spend all day, every day, coming on here and searching through hundreds or thousands of posts to upvote "the best" each day.
They won't need to
the idea is to have the current bid botters become curation services that'll compete over better curation which should at least have a semblance of representing the contents appeal rather than none at all, leading to the dumpster of a front page we have now
SMTs may be here soon but it'll likely take forever (assuming we even survive for much longer) for any of them to get to a point where they'll command enough value and market confidence to test economic behavior. The implementation for these changes is relatively trivial (a week or so) and won't really affect SMT releases. But I don't think SMTs will be able to carry us out of this mess. I'm not that optimistic that I think they can mitigate the failure of the base economy
And you think flags/downvotes will be used responsibly or reasonably when they are free?