Furthermore, people act like there's a track record of super-sneaky NSA backdoors, and that Dual EC shows we can't trust anything NSA produces. I don't trust the NSA at all. But Dual EC wasn't sneaky. There were only two surprising things about Dual EC:
(1) That they actually managed to get anyone to use it, despite how clunky and slow and unreasonable the design was.
(2) That having produced a design that stuck out like a sore thumb for clunkiness, slowness, and unreasonableness, that design would be their backdoor; we gave them a lot more credit for tradecraft than that.
People knew there was something shady about Dual EC almost from the jump. It is a random number generator that works by encrypting random state with a public key for which the private key is undisclosed. It's obviously weird.
That's not the case with SPECK and SIMON. They're mainstream designs, and, more importantly, if you can hide a backdoor in a simple ARX Feistel block cipher that can be implemented in 100 lines of code, we probably have bigger concerns than these algorithms.
Should you use SIMON and SPECK? Of course not. You shouldn't go anywhere near lightweight ciphers unless you know exactly what you're doing, and if you know exactly what you're doing, there are less politically controversial lightweight ciphers to use. The problem here isn't that the world is being deprived of SIMON and SPECK; it's that we're getting too practiced at turning our brains off.