At the same time - does "mainstream adoption" require most people to understand the technical details?

The only people who need to deeply understand this are the CTOs, the technical leaders of the corporations that will leverage SMT technology. For those people, the white paper for SMTs should be easy to understand.

Hell, even for me - it only took about two hours to go through the paper and understand all the key points. How much easier does it need to be? Consider that this is technology which creates a new currency. I think there's some complexity inherent in that.