Thank you for the thought provoking post. Let me challenge it a bit though...
Your opinion seems to be that demand will come from projects needing RCs for outside users. I would say that most projects that choose to build on Steem would be doing it in hopes to tap into its current community. I'll explain, if a project wanted to utilize Steem's technology it has two options, 1. buy a lot of STEEM, 2. clone Steem, pre-mine a lot of tokens and use the free RCs to create many account tickets and delegate to a lot of people.
Right now STEEM is pretty cheap, so a lazy team might just buy some up. But it is really not all that expensive for a team to clone Steem and adapt it a little to their own needs. So I am not sure that businesses will choose to make buy a lot of STEEM and make an SMT over cloning, unless it is to obtain access to the users already on Steem.
This is why I believe Steem needs to reach out to many user-types rather than focus on the businesses. If you look at Ethereum you see that large businesses usually choose to use its code and not make a dapp. I think this is because they are not attracted to getting the users on the public version because its too small to them and they're fine with their closed off, private version. Yet, Ethereum is the place to be when thinking about making a DeFi dapp that wants to be interoperable with other DeFi applications.
People say "blockchain is the innovation not [insert blockchain name]" and I believe that has some truth to it under certain conditions and is wrong in others. Blockchains are just like social networks, there are a lot of social networks online, anyone can make one, so what makes Facebook, Twitter and Youtube so important? It's all the users. In the same way, I believe its not businesses before users but users before businesses. imo :)