Why aren't you taking in consideration the argument that says that to distribute a currency far and wide, you need to give it for free. The more people use steem, the better it is and the more useful it becomes as a currency. If someone earns steem just by posting he is 1000X times more likely to know about it, buy it, hodl it, then bring over his friends etc...

However, if people only earn SMTs, then they'll only talk about those SMTs. I agree with you in the long term. If Steem ever manages to have a huge network effect and capture almost all the crypto market like Bitcoin and Eth, then yes, what you say makes sense.

But until then, let's keep things this way because we want more people to adopt STEEM as a currency. What I am saying is especially true if a company will hodl STEEM to provide RCs to its users without them even knowing about STEEM.