[gameshot911]

Gentle reminder that it's good practice to define your acronyms at least once, particularly for audiences they may not be SMES.

[stordoff]

SMES = Subject Matter Experts? (searching SMES/SME mostly brings up small and medium-sized enterprises)

[mango7283]

Yes, subject matter expert is what it means in that context.

Now I need an SME in linguistics to tell me if the usage as an acronym on that sentence is irony or not.