Will nerfing SF really help anything to do with the game?

Yes nerfing SF would raise the prices of the mini smite crawlers even more! Everyone go get one now before their prices shoot up even further!

hes kidding right? theres no such thing as mini smite crawlers is there?

In the category of original (and annoying?) design action that some (crazy) designer could take: put SF on monsters that you must kill to get to the end-goal :P

Or more seriously create a new condition that triggers whenever someone in the instance uses SF and that would allow monsters to challenge the SF sins.

Such a feature would only be good against SF, though. If they want to put more of a "stomp" on farming they would have to formulate how the enemy AI receives the combination of the skills of the player, and if it would actually be worthwhile to attack or use skills on said player. So much of SF could just be countered if the enemies stopped attacking and wasting all their energy through failure after failure after failure of spell.

Of course, that's a pretty big "if"...

Smart design would bring together various features, e.g. adjusted monsters (AI, skill, etc.) and environment (condition, position, etc.). As you know, gameplay is the result of a sum of complex things. (instead of SF actually transforming this design principle into a quasi-mono-task)

Do you play for rewards or do you play for the gameplay?

Both. If I want to play for no reward I would go PvP (well I guess Z keys was added, so even PvP players want rewards)...or play a game like starcraft, or a FPS game like counter strike. If you want to play just for the game play then go ahead, but don't try to turn a RPG into some sort of quasi strategy game and ruin it for other players. Wanting a correct reward scale is perfectly normal for RPG players, its you who is the odd one who think its somehow wrong to want decent reward in a RPG game.