I'm not surprised people don't understand why MIRA is so critical, and that means we should do a better job with education, but MIRA is absolutely necessary prior to SMTs because it is a scaling solution. The cost of running steemd nodes is just too damn high. Period. MIRA will move the blockchain from RAM (expensive) to commodity hardware (cheap). This will dramatically lower the cost of running a node, which most dapp developers do. There's a reason why the only dapps people actually use are on the Steem blockchain, and it's because we solve the hard problems, not the sexy problems. People can waste their time building apps on other platforms, but the moment they get any traction, they'll realize they're screwed because their costs are going to go through the roof. We expect SMTs to dramatically increase the number of transactions happening on our blockchain (which are already extremely high) and so while MIRA will help every node operator (including witnesses) in the short run, it will also be extremely beneficial for ensuring a positive user experience once SMTs launch. It's solutions like MIRA that are actually doing the heavy lifting with respect to maintaining our significant lead over other projects in the space who aren't solving the REAL problems. They aren't capable of understanding what those problems are because they don't have real apps with real users operating in real time like we do.