Imo the people dissatisfied with hf 22 and the freedown vote pool know their days are numbered, especially with talk of using smt to reward, rather than steem (something we should do straight away if forking).
I think the timing is right now. No SMT that sells votes will be worth a penny since it is only a one way street without a reward pool to exploit.
This isn't antibusiness at all. It is antiabuse. There are hundreds of chains that support business amd they can sell SMT like mobile games amd reward soft currency, buy proper ads on frontends or pay people (>like you and me<) to write ad posts. They are just here for the community, they want to exploit, not to play fairly.
If I'm wrong people will agree to wait 6 months until after SMT is released before wanting to reevaluate EIP model. They are just trying to 'double-team' the community with justin and don't care if he screws them for dessert.
Who is developing SMTs these days? Didn't the developers working on them quit?
The code was mostly if not entirely done (other than final testing) and a non-Steemit dev, @howo is paid by SPS to do the final testing. It will take some time, and current events were certainly not on anyone's roadmap, but it can probably still get deployed once some remaining issues get resolved.
Some of the early work on SMTs was done by my team, and they know the code concepts well (they even have some ideas for optimizations they want to do).
So SMT's are still a thing? Judging by the complete lack of communication with Steemit team (wonder if there's anyone left there) and the recent chaos regarding governance, I have a feeling that they are far from being released.
I think now we, the community needs to take up the development via SPS mechanism. This is the reason why witnesses have been demanding to have funds allotted to SPS to fund development. Anyways, unless we take back the consensus, none of that it going to happen any time soon.
There's a lot of interest in SMTs, so I think SMTs are definitely "still a thing". My devs worked on SMT code early on, and had ideas for how to make them more efficient. It's not a huge part of my personal vision for Steem, but one of the things I see changing in this blockchain is that the future development won't be controlled by a few people.
Interesting question. It's probably on pause, but it was close to being released and those developers still like the community.