Excellent read and your conclusion is precisely my view.

Smart Media Tokens and the attention trading have the greatest potential to establish a long-term positive trend for the price of HIVE

I had s similar conversation just recently. That rewarding the time spent as an active observer needs reward in order to retain a large userbase. Just rewards for CONTENT (and clicking an upvote button) is a limited system.

I believe that HIVE could implement that now. Without SMT. A simple example would be creating a chat app that rewards the mundane social interactions. Users who don't even interact with the platform can earn incentive rewards, and by that, the Blockchain benefits. Fractions of hive accumulated by simply choosing HIVE for your communications would be a good way to reward people from disadvantaged countries (provided the use of the rewards in real world is also implemented).

You can then build on that model using your examples. A user can then opt to receive ads. That grants them a little better ability for rewards and the brands advertising have actual ability for an ad to be viewed and lead to possible product sale. Rewarding purchasing through this system again, also something that could carry incentives.

All these proposals currently exist as little closed projects that, as you explain, see themselves as mass adoption solutions but really WON'T add the value the platform needs. Without SMTs also, the fundamental backbone is missing in order for these operations to be truly working for that common goal.

Personally I've got some clever ways on how this here (and Blockchain in general) could be coupled with other platforms which would be great benefit to this platform, the talent of content creators, and the future price. The system just isn't there yet though so I won't elaborate on them.

I see this system as a top down solution. Reward the top and convince yourself that you're going to attract masses... simply because you've become indoctrinated into the cultish belief that this is the best Blockchain and everyone in the world will want to be a blogger or a clicker.