Thank you so much for writing this Kevin, I'm sorry I didn't get to this sooner as I was fielding comments in the other post

I first want to publicly thank you for all the help for all your help on making the Economic Improvement Proposal (EIP) possible. You've been instrumental in contributing your own ideas to the discussion to shape the EIP and tireless in pushing this agenda during times when I myself had lost all hope.

Throughout the last year I had reached out to numerous esteemed members of the platform, and until very recently, you were truly the only one who took on board my ideas with any level of seriousness. Even more serious than myself. It was tremendously frustrating and demotivating to feel that we had the right answer but were constantly ignored over the course of a year, but you never gave up when I had many times.

It's thanks predominantly to your efforts that Steemit Inc is viewing this as a serious issue today. This discussion is long overdue.

I entirely agree with your point that it's far too optimistic to believe SMTs and Communities are likely to rescue this broken economic system. How sound is it to build a second layer to do the exact job that the base layer failed to do and expect it to do so well it can revive the entire ecosystem?

Imagine how good SMTs and Communities would realistically have to be to carry the dumpster fire of a base system that undermines its own mission statement.

It's like the house is on fire and half of us are debating whether we should put it out or go buy a new couch to put in the lounge room that's burning down.

'aww but I've been looking forward to getting that couch for so long'
'aww we've saved up forever for that couch and now you want to spend a bit of that money on an increased water bill?'
'bah, how sure are you that putting out the fire is going to increase the resale value of the house more than a new couch?'

It's just insanity. There are many projects out there with over 10x our market cap, whose base economies don't require people to take a dump in public just to redundantly get their staking returns, who've had their secondary layer up for a while and have yet to give birth to a single valuable secondary token, yet we think our CMC rank 60 and dropping project can be rescued by a secondary layer in time? We can't afford to be that deluded!

It's far more likely that playing to our strengths by fixing a content discovery and rewards system to actually function would organically bring in users and engagement that can then be leveraged by projects built over SMTs. This in turn would be a positive cycle contributing to the value of the ecosystem as a whole.

In practice, the EIP takes relatively little dev efforts so they'd be next to no delay to SMTs and Communities anyway.

Thank you for all your friendship and help over the past year Kevin, really appreciate it, no matter how this plays out.