Fully agree that the move from POW to POS made the Ethereum network too easily controlled by the players/nodes with the highest stake. While it does have the first-mover advantage for being a smart contract blockchain, so much of its traffic has now moved to Layer 2 solutions like Polygon, Arbitrum, and Optimism. Even exchange Coinbase has developed its own Layer 2 -- Base.
What all this means to me is that ETH's days are numbered as the go-to blockchain for smart contract transactions. If people want speed/price, they will go somewhere else. If people want decentralization, they will go somewhere else. It is purely legacy at this point, and like many of the articles you write, its Layer 1 system is simply something to be built on but rarely used outright on its own. It is evident that the ETH whales see this writing on the wall, as tons of large accounts have moved huge chunks of ETH back onto exchanges to be sold off.
Also, Gavin Wood eventually left Ethereum to found his own blockchain -- Polkadot. I'm not exactly sure how much different that network is from ETH, but I do know that it uses an interesting bidding system to get approved to run nodes (or something like that). I think the bidding system makes it slightly less prone to centralization issues, but still, people can pool funds to win the auction in a somewhat centralized way.
I very much like the way Hive is structured and the way the witnesses are sharing the block rewards as they cycle through the user base.
Hoskinson always started Cardano. So they are all over the place.
Ethereum is still strong and I believe will hold great appeal to the bankers and Wall Street. As for the other EVMs, none of them are really setting the world on fire.
Huge fan of Polygon and Binance Smart Chain. I lean on the BSC a ton to do DeFi swaps to get my DEC/SPS tokens into the Hive Blockchain to play Splinterlands.
Right now they are the entry and exit points for Hive. They do serve a very useful purpose. We will see what buildout occurs in the future in terms of outreach for Hive. Ultimately, we will have to go through something.