I agree that STEEM already has a ton more to offer than most cryptos out there, it's the #32 crypto by market cap for perfectly sound reasons. So I don't quite see where the comparison with pump&dump coins comes into play.

The risk for further downwards momentum that I see with what I dramatically called "rampant abuse" is the fact that there's a big pressure to extract value from the platform rather than contributing to it.

I do see a point can be made that SMTs may be drawing in more permanent engagement and thus create value. I certainly do hope that's what we'll be able to see. I am just a bit concerned it will bring another wave of scammy SMT-ICOs like we see with tons of ERC20 tokens... where there's only one motive... value extraction.

Either way... it will be interesting to see it play out in the steem ecosystem. Let's hope for the best. While I might sound a bit pessimistic here, that was just concerning this little point I wanted to make... all in all I still believe we can make this platform grow into a wonderfully diverse and thriving platform.