Hey Andrew,
I think that focusing on the protocol to facilitate devs is a good choice. What I am hoping is that it will encourage much more outward facing development than inward that aims to only draw from the inflation pool.

SMTs I think were a decent way to encourage this as it separated applications and gave them incentive to innovate for an external audience by leveraging the infrastructure to be successful in their own right. This in turn would pull people into Steem based on interest.

A few weeks back I revived an idea of locking stake which could be a way to tie investors in to Steem to be leveraged by apps for development purposes which could possibly tie into the separation of user group with investors and developers working on the Steem layer but creating for the practical user layer on SMTs.

The separation of needs is important in the development process and it is something that is getting blurred in the protocols as there are users who cross the boundaries of several groups. Investors, developers, contributors and consumers each need to be catered for but there is no line of best fit that satisfies all so creating some harder division to define spaces will also encourage users to better find their place and behave according to which space they are occupying at the time with greater understanding.

Thanks for the update, you write well and I would like to read more of this kind of thing in the future.