"When Steemit.com started it had to solve a problem. How do we initially distribute our coins so that a maximum of people are able to curate and affect the reward pool. Witnesses and early adopters like myself, created content and worked hard at upvoting as many people as possible everyday."

This is also exactly the point where a lot of criticism has been directed at. People tend to form opinions based on first glance. Some very outspoken people have said that the total distribution of Steem and the self-rewarding factors for large stakeholders are precisely what is not optimal on Steemit (for example there are, and have been, posts on this platform with very high rewards, but not necessarily excellent content). However time will tell. The ultimate goal is for Steem to completely transform the internet, how we look at it and how we think about it, at least that's what I hear Ned say. If Steemit succeeds in this quest, the solutions chosen at the time for the dillemma of how to distribute the tokens will prove to have been wise.

But, going forward, I expect to see many different solutions for distributing tokens, for algorithms to define how rewards are distributed in the rewards pool and depending on their successes or failures we will see what works best.

Maybe you can start an SMT for only 1 SBD, but without serious thought about the real value you can offer to a specific community, how you will distribute the initial tokens, how you will reward content creation vs curation and how exactly the system will calculate payouts (incorporating on portion of stake, time passed after post, amount of votes done per day, etc, etc) your token will be worthless. You must have a clear strategy on these matters, or not only your 1 SBD is lost, but you have also created a failed token. And the latter would reflect badly on SMT's as a disruptive technology.