Nice analogy to fruit economy here. I think your best paragraph was the following -
"Now let’s get back to BitShares. Bitshares is an online currency. By owning the currency in an online ledger, you can prove you have the money. It is also possible to lock up the money. When the money is locked up you can issue bitUSD and bitCNY. These are IOU’s that represent a set amount of money. The advantage to these is they can trade securely online. They are crypto-money, and we know they are backed up by real Crypto-currency."
Simple and to the point. My question for you is how do you look at bts? It's not quite money, to me it seems more than that. Like a commodity in a digital ledger which enables the holder to enter into smart contracts.
One can look at BTS as on online money -like bitcoin. One can look at is as prepaid trading fees in an online exchange. One can look at it as a speculative Alt currency. Mostly I look at BTS as I would look at a stock. I think of BTS like I think of stock in IBM, Microsoft Google or Facebook. In this way BTS is ownership in a online crypto-exchange. BTS is one of the rare crypto-currencies with a sustainable business model. It actually makes money from trading fees. I will admit this analysis isn't prefect, but by the time one gets to debating these various views, they likely already have a good understanding of what bitshares is.