Let me first start by saying that I'm a big fan of soft consensus and my preferred term for it is embedded consensus. I even think that a better approach to SMT than trying to build a lot of complicated functional into the blockchain that will be very difficult to ever test and establish quality control with a high degree of confidence (compare the scope and complexity of SMT with the past two hard forks which have been a disaster on that score), and then will continue to be very difficult to upgrade, would be to embrace Steem-Engine (or its current developers aren't agreeable to fully open sourcing and decentralizing it, clone it instead) and develop it further with a clear, well-documented, well-supported, and fully fleshed-out decentralized embedded consensus model.

That being said, I'm also very put off by the constant anti-smart contract drumbeat that seems to come from Steemit. As noted by @blocktrades elsewhere in this thread, smart contracts are a way for the blockchain to support certain forms of computation without needing to hard code every single operation into the core consensus layer, require forks for each and every change and update, and possibly destabilize the core layer interrupting or damaging service for every single user.

Given the approach of RC it would be quite possible to support smart contracts for those application which really benefit while limiting (by cost) the ability of unconstrained smart contracts to weigh down the whole system and destroy decentralization via bloat. For a great many functions which do not need to be nor benefit from being executed and validated within the core layer, relative RC cost would encourage developers to use a soft-consensus approach instead. That may be a lot, but without an enormous amount of convincing (which we are poorly positioned to do as a small minority blockchain and project in a larger marketplace) and in some cases serious technical compromises, it isn't everything.

So yes, I'm all in favor of soft consensus aka embedded consensus, and I absolutely agree it can be made fully decentralized and be a very powerful side-chain-like approach, but I don't think we need to engage in a religious war against native smart contracts which are extremely popular with blockchain application developers and unquestionably useful (including as a bridge for making embedded consensus more powerful and useful). Such a war only serves to marginalize us and make Steem less useful to certain application developers (possibly a very large and wide subset). We should instead embrace both, which was always the original vision of Steem to begin with.

How and why did we get off this track?