Thank you. I do feel that this is a petty question, like how to tithe salt, but with your permission I’ll keep trying to clarify it anyway, because what you explained is right, but I probably need to hear it one more time—it’s still slipping a bit through my fingers.
From the standpoint of the act itself—benefiting from the products of wrongful animal-raising—seemingly there is no difference between smell and eating.
So I conclude that in your view (and I think so too), the whole problem is from the standpoint of the future result, and one judges according to the situation as a general rule. And from this it follows that if suddenly all living animals disappeared from the world, there would be no problem eating the meat that had already been slaughtered.
But it still seems clear that if they sold minutes of standing and smelling next to the stand, that would be like eating and would be “forbidden.” By the way, the act of smelling is indeed not consumptive, but the smell itself fades over time, and most of the smell comes off during preparation and not from the finished product (grilled meat > cooked chicken), so in order to produce the smell they would need to raise more and more animals.
That is, the reason smell is not consumptive enjoyment is because today animals are not raised and sold for the sake of smell, but for eating and other products.
But after all, even in eating you can find corners that don’t cause any reduction—for example, if I took a little from someone else’s portion at a wedding where there is one portion per person—and obviously the logic simply includes this under the general category of eating and that’s that; we don’t examine every sub-case on its own.
So how is it that the general category is “eating” (and this includes incidental cases where the eating does not affect the outcome even if it were a general rule), and not “benefit” (which would also include smell nowadays, when it does not affect the outcome)? If there were a special word in the language for eating-in-a-case-where-the-outcome-is-affected-under-a-general-rule, would that be the category? But our words and terms are chosen (or exist) according to what is generally convenient to use (or identify) in the world, not specifically in relation to veganism, so what is the logic of using דווקא the conceptual generalizations of our current language?

One more small aside: regarding the permissibility of “benefit that comes through a wrongdoing,” from the standpoint of the act when there is no difference in outcome, seemingly one can always broaden the perspective to other benefits from other wrongs, and then forbid in general any benefit that comes from wrongdoing, even if in the specific case before us there is no difference in outcome, because in the case of a general rule I would want to forbid benefits that come from wrongs, since that already has consequences.

Indeed, these are questions about tithing salt. As I wrote, what is forbidden is benefit that will lead to problematic results. If with smell there is also such a situation, then there too it should be forbidden. And if with eating there are situations where this is not so, then it should not be forbidden. I have nothing to add.