Great question.

In my personal opinion, efforts should be focused on completing the unfinished parts of the existing road map rather than expanding it by introducing smart contracts. The good thing about smart contracts on a side chain (a set of separate servers acting upon the operations stored on Hive as json transactions) is that no fork of any kind would be required. But designing, coding and testing a smart contract capability is a lot of work. Also, there already exist many chains out there that have this capability. Hive apps that need smart contracts could make use of them.

SMTs are absolutely crucial. It's painful that the SMT protocol is not deployed, yet. If it were, entire communities could be onboarded in one feel swoop by using Hive to tokenize them like some communities already are on Reddit by using ERC-20 tokens. We do not want to miss that train! A first mover advantage in that domain is too precious to squander!