My observation —albeit from much farther away than you — is that the output follows what’s intellectually interesting or technically difficult, as opposed to what’s commercially superior. I did this myself as a technical founder many times, pursuing what I found interesting as opposed to the hard and often monotonous work of interviewing customers and empathizing with them.
I also went to law school, which has its entire model of aspiration around wanting to be a law professor (well, at least at Yale Law School). It was so easy to get sucked into wanting to be in that intellectual realm.
So I look at the space from a sense that so much of the discussion and output is delivering along a very inward-looking pseudo-academic vector. Only bitcoin has been different in my opinion — solves some real problems. I keep waiting to read about the next 10X better consumer (or SMB) product out of crypto builders.
