POLO announcing

Polo is owned by Tron. It's also a nearly-abandoned exchange that was once relevant, but has not had much importance in the industry for a long time. This means very little if anything.

Sure but for the most part others outside that close circle aren't going to get funded.

That's not really the point. Obviously anything sensible that gives people money for work with little to no recourse if the work isn't done (other than cutting off future funding) is going to involve recipients with some sort of reputation. The whole platform would be a whole lot better off if we stopped giving large amounts of money to people who, at least as often as not, turn out to be scammers. It is not SPS that is dysfunctional here, it is the rest of the rewarding system.

To be specific, @howo is not even a witness and is funded to do testing of the SMT code (something the Steemit devs should have done, but only did minimally, if at all). @netuoso is funded to work on the desktop wallet and while he is a witness, he dropped out of the top 20 long ago and currently sits at #52, earning essentially nothing. (And, contrary to your claims, neither was doing this work previously.)

Any competent Steem devs who want to be funded by SPS would be in the same category. The test of SPS is not whether if funds randos, it is whether it funds reputable, competent people when there is work to be done and someone qualified to do it, and also that it does not fund milkers and scammers. So far the answer seems to be yes on both.

Anyway, we will see what happens. One thing we agree on is that Steem has not exactly taken the world by storm. There are ample opportunities for Tron, 'Steem Classic', or other solutions altogether to do better in the future.