My opinion about surplus, it's just one of the many thing they use to control grinding. Even if they were to remove it they would just control it differently probably by changing the sp mobs give and the sp needed to rank up.

I find it a bit funny that people are stuck on surplus while other modifications from the first sp patch that made it fix sp to more recently the removal of sp bonus when there's more than 8 people in party were all ways to control ranking up speed but nobody minded those. Still the problem with it is the presentation. Because it's call fatigue and presented as a penalty, it annoy a lot of players. If instead of calling it normal sp, tier 1 fatigue, tier 2 fatigue, etc, they called it bonus sp(current normal one), normal sp(tier 1 fatigue) and fatigue tier 1, 2,etc, everyone reaction would probably be better. Sure some players would still be annoyed but since you would spend a good amount of time in "bonus" and normal sp, you probably wouldn't mind it as much.