I already answered most of it in your other comment. But yeah, I also wish things went faster, starting 2 years ago. I can still remember in Lisbon (SF2) @ned telling me how the SMTs would be on the testnet in january 2018!!

Now it's a bit late in my opinion, and releasing SMTs now won't really do so much considering we're in 2019 and all other decent chains have similar solutions. We even have community-built solutions like steem-engine to do it without leaving steem chain. That's what I told SteemIt Inc staff recently in a call where they questioned me about SMTs.

SteemIt Inc said this year was about survival and focusing on a specific part of STEEM. For me it should be the economics and pob. There's tons of research and experimentation required to achieve a truly fair distribution, which is the ultimate goal. It's the interesting part of STEEM, the one which got us the most results (most users are on steem because of this feature in the first place). Yet, instead, devs prefer working on yet another UI that does the same thing as the previous one, or finding new concepts (games, exchanges, gambling) to connect into STEEM and profit. NOBODY wants to do the blockchain work for free, if it benefits everyone.

SPS will be used for syphoning imo. The same people currently acting bad in the network will exploit it. It will pay for a few people's vacations in bangkok basically. HF21 should be just the EIP. Instead we force the SPS in it, because we know people are all dying for the econ changes, so they just say yes. Also, the SPS will take rewards away from the contents reward pool, so you can imagine how I feel about it :))