I believe that SMT's starting up here will turn into asking for delegations and curations to reward the investors with their SMT instead of asking for direct investments.

I think that there will be some of each, potentially within the same projects. The amount of SMTs you could obtain with a direct investment should be much higher than that available from a delegation or curation with the same level of capital.

I think that more and more investors will start delegating to SMT's and Steem will mainly be used as a way to invest into other projects on the Steem network

I'm hoping that this will be the next era of Steem. The spare capital that passive investors currently delegate to vote buying services will start to seek a potentially better (long-term) return through investing or delegating to SMT projects. We will move from the bid-bot era to the SMT era.