>So what is it that makes SMTs so powerful?

There is only 1 single thing that will make SMTs potentially powerful beyond anything else. 
<h3>Customer experience and ease of use.</h3>

If the front ends provide guest accounts tied into the absolute ease (as presented by Steemit.inc) of creating your token then we might have a game changer. 
The difficulty of creating ERC20 tokens for a regular user with how slow the platform is with constant fee payments is what creates a chance for STEEM. 
<b>Steems speed, 2 sec transaction time and 0 fees, browser frontends that require no need to download software, compliment guest accounts and SMTs perfectly.</b>

Ive said it a million times. There is not a single platform out there that can achieve what Steem can. 
Steem has transformative power. Give BTCG the ETH market cap, give Verge, TRON, EOS and what happens???
Nothing, the holders get rich. But give Steem the mc of ETH and you have a facebook rival, reddit rival, a youtube rival. You have the potential to onboard millions. 
We have already seen that when Steem had only a 1 billion market cap during ath and steemit was a top 800 website. So proof is there. 
Show me a crypto with 1/10th of the immediate potential Steem has and ill burn all the steem i hold.