It's ultimately up to users to evaluate the risk of holding market pegged assets.
Had the Gridcoin MPA not been created, we wouldn't be talking about how to recover MPAs from a black swan event - something that will (most likely) happen in the future for existing smartcoins.
I agree that a side chain or 2-way peg for Gridcoin to be traded/stored in a decentralized manner on the BTS platform (without involving exchange backed assets nor BTS collateral) would be better than an MPA, but sidechains aren't in production yet.
I've enquired about getting Gridcoin added as one of the first sidechains, looking forwards to hearing back from the bunkerchainlabs guys.
While I do agree with jonnybitcoin that the best candidates for bitassets early on are fiat and other highly traded commodities, I also think that getting cryptocommunities onboard to work on bitassets and experimenting with them is the only way we find the best ways to help bitassets succeed in general. The more we learn (and document), the better we all are.
I don't think it looks badly on bitassets in general as long as people are informed that bitassets with low liquidity can be dangerous.
As for sidechains, its a great idea and one we should all work toward.