SMTs can experiment with their own payout times if so inclined.

Unfortunately it has become a common and lazy habit to claim that SMTs are going to fix everything. In fact, a lot about SMTs is fixed using the same mechanism as the global pool, and not arbitrarily configurable, at least in its initial implementation, which doesn't even exist yet, and god knows how long it will take to not only be completed but to reach a level of quality and reliability that can be responsibly deployed. I don't recall if payout time was one of them but I think it very well might be.

A more fully configurable vision of SMTs where each and every little aspect of behavior can be configured on a per-SMT basis is a pipe dream that could be years or even decades away given the philosophy behind SMTs. A far better approach would be abandon this idea of hard coding everything into the blockchain itself and go back to the original plan for smart contracts where different projects can build their own SMT (or whatever you want to call it) to work however they like.

Some sleeper hits are always missed by the way. I can think of one case where an interesting post was pointed out to me months later and received near-zero votes originally. Any payout time is going to be a compromise, particularly when power down time is tied to it (though until we convince enough people that power down time needs to be short, this doesn't matter in practice).