From past experience with technological advances, the more "darwinian" the approach, the more profitable. Ethereum is basically saying "we don't know where block chain technology is going, so we're going to allow poeple to use our platform and figure it out" which is a much safer bet than crypto currencies bet of "we're pretty sure people are going to use blockchain mostly for money" - as we've seen from the past, it's hard to predict where technologies will end up. If you witnessed the first TCP/IP transaction at the creation of the internet, that's a long stretch from instantly buying something off Amazon and having it delivered to your door the next day.