Whereas PoW baskets can be woven by anyone with free time and necessary skills.
You mean anyone with custom, production monopoly-prone specialized hardware.
Well, not exactly. Ethereum and many alts are still mined using normal GPUs, also suitable for gamers or genome microbiologists.
I view them as spare liquidity reservoir for Bitcoin.
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A PoS system without issuance is nothing more than a second layer protocol for bitcoin (one may suggest to understand LN as a PoS network on top of bitcoin) and with issuance, it is just a scam no matter how big and popular it is, it is a scam just like USD.
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On PoW/PoS hybrids.
I don't know about Decred (their "foundation tax" from mined coins taken forever seems fishy to me) but in
Metro based on NXT plus BitcoinJ-like PoW they seem to have an interesting proposition. NXT is example of PoS system without issuance, but with bad initial distribution since they never had mining, or even an ICO.
PoS-produced blocks of Metro are very frequent, like dozen per minute, so it enables LN-like applications and decentralized on-chain exchange working faster/cheaper than Etherdelta. Whereas PoW blocks are once per 10 minutes like in Bitcoin.
Both Bitcoin (via RootStock, MainNet since Jan 2018) and BitcoinCash (in Jul) already enabled smart contracts on their pegged tokens, thus Metro is able to become a sidechain to them.
Too bad Metro took as their codebase NXT (former BitcoinNext, BCNext) with accounts system like in Ethereum, I guess they would be better off taking BitcoinJ or similar Java implementation of Bitcoin as codebase adding blind shooter PoS algo.
Obviously, Java gives advantage over C++ that programmers are plenty, and NXT has plugins architecture which enables to implement sophisticated additional features, whether in NXT or in it's "clones".
Whether all this will be better, worse or complementing LN, it's hard to say right now.