What the whitepaper claims is what the intention and purpose was. People can make excuses all they want, but the fact is, SBD has failed in its given purpose of "always being worth between $0.99 and $1.01". SBD conversions always assume SBD is worth $1 internally, so yes, there is a peg. This leads to runaway STEEM inflation (correction: it's not actually runaway, caps at 10% DTO) whenever SBD falls under $1 (currently, $0.62) as extra STEEM is printed to compensate for it. This leads to STEEM crashing even further, until debt ratio exceeds 10%. (Currently over 15%) Beyond 10%, yes, there is no peg anywhere, it's just a worthless asset. Your comments on "increasing debt ratio from 5% to 10% was an error" indicates to me that you are confused too, and do not understand how SBD works. As I stated above, debt ratio is not increased by anyone, it happens as a result of STEEM's market cap crashing versus the SBD debt that has been piled up before.

You're right that this would change Steem into not-Steem. As I said in my OP, I understand people like the general paradigm of Steem as it is, and just want to see improvements on top of it. I think it's a catastrophic failure, and at least a radical attempt needs to be made.