There's a strong team and a huge community behind Ethereum.
If they are persistent enough they have all the chances to switch to PoS, implement Ethereum Sharding and add many more features to fix eth's problems.

As for other projects that are similar to eth, I'm a big fan of EOS:
- 0 fees,
- instant transactions
- max registered tps 4k
- the possibility to reverse a transaction if your funds are stolen