Fact is, SBD is a little tough to understand at first
I didn't understand quite how SBD was supposed to work, so I fired off a post, "Somethings' wrong with SBD", cause well, I thought there was somethign wrong with it, based on this chart:
...then I postulated maybe it wasn't supposed to track USD?!
...and that witnesses were supposed to ensure that it actually tracked the dollar. Sadly, this does not look like a currency that is tracking the dollar. I can't say exactly what it looks like, because I'm not someone who can look at a graph like this and instantly say that it looks like X, Y , or Z.
Earlier photo of internal market without actual trades
Later, I made some actual trades after getting these helpful hints from Mr. Steem himself, 
:
Here are my actual trades:
As you can see yesterday I made a trade that would pay out very well only if the price of STEEM hit ludicrous levels. Today, I made successive trades that increased by one penny towards a large sell order for steem at $2.18. I figured that anything I bought at $2.18 would go through instantly, and it did.
My Orders:
My Filled Order ($2.18 for one STEEM, that's me at the top!)
Poloniex Price at around the time I placed these orders
What I clicked to make an order go through instantly:
While I was writing this, my other orders were filled also:
What'd we learn here?
- SBD works more or less the way it should and it'll never work better than more or less the way it should because it's an approximate thing subject to the various whims of unpredictable humans-- but "more or less" is exactly how it was designed.
- The Internal market might offer better deals than selling SBD on poloniex, which is what started this whole rigamarole-- I was going to try doing that to get a single "hop" to BTC.
- Ask a question on Steemit, even mangle a bunch of half understood facts together, you'll get an answer.
I <3 Steemit, and things related to it.
Thanks to all who replied with INFORMATION that caused me to seek KNOWLEDGE. This was not a bitching post, it was a fixing post, and it turned out what needed fixing was my education level about how these real-time cryptocurrency markets work. It's intense!