I totally get why you feel this way, but it's not at all what we mean. Content sharing and rewarding is still going to be a huge part of Steem. But in order to make content rewarding work even better, different communities and organizations need to be able to determine for themselves what is valuable and what is not. In order to do this, they need their own token which symbolizes their unique subjective valuations. Another benefit of this is that the added experimentation can help inform the base token and layer.

But while we were thinking about these solutions, we realized that there was no technical reason to limit these tokens to the use case of content sharing and rewarding. That would be an arbitrary limit on what Steem can be used to do. An SMT can be used to solve any of the problems people have been claiming blockchain can be used to solve, but which are limited by long/variable transaction times and transaction fees.

In short, I wouldn't say that the role of content sharing and rewarding is in any way diminishing. In fact, it will be getting a huge upgrade. But at the same time the role of Steem as a financial layer that can add tremendous value to the global economy is increasing as well. Since this wasn't something Steem was used for in the past, the delta is larger.