That's fair, and as much as I like Smart and do think he has serious value, I also do agree that he himself is not The Guy on a championship roster.
My issue with Lonzo is that next year is a contract year for him, and the better he plays (which obviously we want), the more likely he is to get paid at the end of that contract year. So there's a balance: obviously we want him to get better, but we don't want him to get valuable enough that another team will be willing to overpay him and force us to either risk overspending or losing him for nothing. This is the same balance you've got to work with when it comes to any young player.
So the question for me is, how likely is it that Lonzo reaches an ability/impact level where paying him the big money he will almost inevitably get offered isn't a horrible mistake? Given how far he has to go to be a reliable, consistent, high impact player, I think that it's not particularly likely. Of course I could always be wrong, and I'm not saying we must trade him immediately or anything, but if I see the possibility of making a deal that I can have reasonable expectations of positive value from that would cost us Lonzo, then I make that deal still.
Of course, in a perfect world Lonzo skips over that balance issue completely and takes the Ingram route, where yes, you're going to be forced to pay more than you would like to keep him but he's producing at a level where that's worth doing. That's an outlier scenario though, imo.