I totally agree on SBD, it's never really served a purpose in my time on Steem, except to give me a little cache that I can convert to STEEM every so often, at which time it feels like found money.
Not sure how I feel about #2 and #3, though I could see a future where the reward pool matters less because I'm earning other tokens. I have mixed feelings on the staking time - I balked at it initially, but as a small time user the staking process encouraged me to build on here in a way that a shorter staking would not have done.