The internet was culturally better when it was harder to use. Same with bitcoin. Ease-of-use equals compromise. The VC's smelled dumb money and convinced us that adoption was the most important focus.
Discussion
Then what's thr most important focus?
Decentralization. Read "The Genesis Book". The whole reason for bitcoin's novelty was the fact that all other previous attempts at private cryptocurrency were centralized, compromisable, arrestable. There was always some brick and mortar building the g-boys could roll up on and shut down.
It’s a fine line between complexity and autism
Adoption was the most important focus due to how easy it would've been to attack Bitcoin.
People forget that we didn't always have Nuclear level defense systems in place.
The internet that you long for still exists. You just have to ignore the noise.
this phenomenon plays out on every single new platform or protocol. I’ve seen it happen so many times.
one of the coolest communities is self hosted activity pub. the barrier to entry is being able to set up and host your own instance.