Theymos, for someone who touts the importance of decentralization above all else, your level of hypocrisy by allowing yourself to play such a central role in the crypto community simply because you were the first to jump major discussion mediums is quite astounding.
Take a look at the interesting and worthwhile developments of the past 5 years, and not just the few your buddies throw their weight behind.
We've built blockchains that are interoperable, language agnostic, free to use, highly scalable, highly secure (in some instances- more secure than Bitcoin)... the list goes on. Some of these are unpolished, like Grin (which you concede), but others are running as well oiled machines. Is there any argument behind your point of view besides ignorance of how the space has changed in the latter half of the decade? "I'm Theymos so I am right" only works so many times.
You seem to have mistaken me for some sort of politician. If anyone interprets anything I say/do as "I'm theymos so I'm right," then they have totally misunderstood me. I'm very interested in grin on a technical level (not so much for investment), and I didn't see any harm in supporting it, so I spent a few hours adding it to the forum. I'm not trying to make any grand statement here. If grin ends up failing completely, then that will not be too surprising.
Occasionally in other cases I might have an attitude of, "I'm doing it this way because I'm convinced that I'm right. If I'm wrong, show me." If you disagree with my view that all but a few altcoins are based 95-100% on marketing, with only very half-baked actual features/ideas, then that's fine; I won't stop you. Use one or more of those altcoins to build interesting things, and I will be happy to see the ecosystem usefully expand in surprising ways.