The obvious defense to this is that the ripple thing is very new, populated by very clueless people and it will improve in time. The risk of course is that absent competent people involved it will simply end up tagged as a failure (which is happening already). The complete inability of the managing team to obtain and retain the support of competent people seems to irreversibly doom this particular installment (even if the ripple idea might eventually come to some fruition, made and marketed by people with actual skills, understanding and connections rather than by random "hey ma look, I can programmate the computor" folks).
What rubbish. Do you think Ripple users are not programmers and BitCoin users? I've been programming for almost 20 years, I was in Bitcoin from the start and introduced it to Amir Taaki and Lazlo Torok, I was a very early adopter of Ripple too, and several other money related things from OpenTransactions through to PaySwarm and the surrounding standards. I understand money, debt, and of course am very familiar with David Graebers work. Most of the other Ripple users I know, also come from a similar background.
And now, some newb, TradeFortress, has been allowed to take a vendetta to the point that he can take over $1k from one of those users and get away with it, me. A complete piss take.