Suppose ETH had no pre-mine, no DAO fork, and stayed on proof of work.
Would you say it's a useful project?
Discussion
No. Even with that criteria Monero is still better than Ethereum, for example.
If ETH was a protocol that did all the dapp functionality without a shitcoin built unto it, then maybe.
But Bitcoiners have already done that and better on Nostr, so forget it.
No.
Impossible for me to think of a use case worth implementing a blockchain (with all of its baggage) besides for hard money. So no.
On chain exchange is pretty cool