Eventually someone listens to that person, and decades of painstakingly built-up brand value gets thrown out the window in order to bring home six nickels tomorrow instead of five.
I get that the reds are more performance oriented, but capacity is still a key factor (if not, you just go SSD and be done with it).
Magnetic disks are valued on capacity only because people considered CMR HDDs a performance floor. When they realize how bad SMR is, I think performance becomes a factor.
If you're talking about GB per volume, SSDs beat HDDs of all stripes there: the biggest HDDs are 16 TB in a 3.5" form factor, while the biggest SSDs are 100 TB in the same form factor. 10 or 50% improvement in HDDs wouldn't begin to bridge that gap.
SMR should be understood to be sort of a fast Tape, rather than slow CMR HDD.
I wouldn't go that far. If I can assume that the firmware won't cause a lot of problems all by itself, I think in my desktop I'd slightly prefer a 7200RPM SMR drive to an equal-price 5400RPM CMR drive.
And no matter what kind of hard drive(s) you're using, take a $20 SSD and use half of it as a cache with writeback enabled.
In fairness, more like an array of tape drives. ;-)
I get what you're saying about how it hasn't panned out in reality, but the question was why did they even try SMR, and I expect that was motivated by the misguided potential of the win.
I suspect Blue and Red drive have a lot of common in manufacturing they switched all drives in same capacity together.
It was well known before that Red are trash compared to Red Pro which IIRC are rebranded HGST DeskStar NAS.