creating utility and liquidity for STEEM would be much more valuable than SBD imho

That was a reasonable view 3-4 years ago, but the market has moved on from that to more of a focus on stable coins, and for good reasons. Volatile tokens don't make for good medium of exchange, unit of account, or store of value (the last is debatable, if one is willing to take a long term point of view).

There just isn't much utility to be had from volatile tokens other than speculating or longer term investing in the platform.

This is one way Steem was actually ahead of its time, but has lost some of that lead by failing to push ahead with development to improve and strengthen SBD.

I think getting rid of SBD (without replacing it with something similar) would be a huge error for Steem, but I could get behind the idea of simplifying between STEEM and SP.