Exchange listing issue

Exchange listings are far less needed because SMTs include a very efficient internal market and can always be traded for STEEM.

barely any demand for Steem as a bandwidth token

If that were the case there would be barely any demand for Steem today at all. Well, there actually isn't, unfortunately, but distributing a lot of it for free that many people dump either quickly or slowly would seem to only make matters worse.

In fact, most demand for all cryptos is probably speculative, that includes speculation on future demand (such as future demand for a bandwidth token should usage take off) as well as simply speculation on shorter-term supply and demand factors, which again would seem to be helped not hurt by better scarcity and less of it being printed and given away.

The main negative I could see would be less distribution and less potential bootstrapping of Steem (in both STEEM and SBD forms) as a future currency among Steem users, which could give it large future demand. But on the other side of that is demand for STEEM as a reserve currency for SMTs, and the fact that people can trade some or all of their SMTs for Steem which might still help with distribution.