I ommited answering what I think is yr actual point. Why rail against scams (however perceived) when one could spend one's time more productively advocating for or developing real solutions?

I agree it's a good point and obviously Satoshi and the cypherpunks took exactly this path. "Real cypherpunks write code"

The minor defence I would offer up is that I'm trying, in a very small way, to run interference on the code that's been written