I have avoided Ethereum like the plage since day one mostly because of technological reasons, and when the DAO fiasco happened I felt like I proved my bias against it.
I felt the same; Ethereum had one USP: "Code is law!". They broke that, which makes them a useless centrally controlled altoin. Created with one goal: make the creator rich!
Having said that, from a market perspective I have to admit that Ethereum had an amazing performance during the last four months, and it's doing remarkably well during this bloody January.
The market can be irrational. Right after the DAO-failure, I never expected so many people to keep buying this coin that can fork at any time!
Ethereum has also been massively used by ITOs (most of them under the fake name ICO). Hundreds of them have a similar looking website, some random BS "idea", many promises, a BS roadmap, and people have been throwing a few billion dollars at them last year. Since they sell tokens running on Ethereum, it profited from this.
Right now Bitcoin have a market cap of $172B, and for Ethereum it's $110B. If this trend continues we may get overpassed this quarter, and since it seems like no new money is coming to the crypto market in general I wonder if people are, for whatever reason, swapping Bitcoin for Ethereum.
The Ethereum-boys have been saying that for a long time now. One way or another, it doesn't matter, Ethereum is nothing like Bitcoin.
Are bad programmed smart contracts running over an insecure platform that hot for this market?
Apparently! If the DOA taught us one thing, it's that nobody understands smart contracts, which renders them useless. I haven't seen a real application yet.