I agree, we need a total new re-shape of the functioning of Steem the base layer Token, its Reward Pool and the relation to the upcoming SMT projects. Here is my take on this.

I would like to see, that the Coin "Steem" and its "Reward Pool" will be designed more towards an infrastructure Coin instead of using it primary for POB content discovery. The reason for that is, that with the introduction of communities and SMT the Steem Ecosystem is not only more about "Content creation" and discovery.
No, we have a bunch of financial dapps, gaming dapps, services etc... which don't have anything to do with content discovery. All those Dapps should have more or less "equal" chances to receive Support from the underlying Steem Reward Pool mechanism to earn and empower their communities.
I think Steem is good with Steempower for Voting on Witnesses and Proposals (plus a new feature in the future Voting for Communities and Dapps) and as a source of Ressource Credits. For me that should be enough, on the level what Steem is doing to support its Ecosystem and for the use of the POB mechanism...only vote for Witnesses, Proposals and SMT or Communities.
No, more voting and abusing the reward pool by creating and discovering or gaming the content creation part.
All this POB content creation and discovery mechanism should be happening on the level of SMTs, and its communities, because these groups will have Admins who are able to set in rules how each community handles its users and the way they value content creation.
If Steem gets understood as a infrastructure Token and SMTs are understood as a empowering Community Token, than we have a clear Vision for all participants Investors, Users and Creators alike.
I don't like the idea that we are aiming for a SMT Ecosystem where all these project fight for attention but the real mining of Steem only happens on the content side of things...somehow that doesn't make sense.
Why should other Dapps or Communities suffer from miss management of the Steem Reward Pool which is only used for content creation and discovery?