As I am sure you can tell from my name, yeah, I definitely don't see Steem as a web 3.0, that's Ethereum, possibly Polkadot and Filecoin as well. But Steem is just 21 witnesses that can be voted in or out by a single company. That's not exactly a great foundation for a future decentralized web, not unless Steem changed the design of the witness system to completely rotate the 21 witnesses to a totally different set of 21 nodes. And if soft consensus is how blockchain is going to scale, then might as well do STARK chains off Ethereum I say.
That said, I agree with you on the shared reward pool. It just does not work to have all these people interested in entirely different topics working for the same reward pool. But does SMTs solve this? Maybe, but why does it? Perhaps its the stake oriented voting system that sucks. SP for the sake of RCs makes sense, but SP for the sake of having higher influence in a blockchain sucks. That is the same model that video games do, which ruins the game. It might pay off devs, but any game that gives paying customers god-mode equipment in an item mall destroy the entire game for everyone not buying that stupid item. This concept is not the best way.
RE: What I Really Think of Steem - Truth Talk