This practice of taking investors money and holding to it, while not delivering the tech and making further delays is questionable. After the manufacturers took the BTC the time pressure became on investors, because manufacturers already took an upfront payment for the full amount of the work and could afford themselves in expense of investors to simply relax and watch "their" money appreciate while not stressing themselves. In my view this practice is highly unethical.
I agree with you completely and as a person who preordered a butterfly labs miner I understand this concern. Ethereum is a massively interactive and rapidly evolving project. You should factor the appreciation of bitcoin into your investment model; however, the goal here is to build a long term ecosystem, not make you 150x in the short term. You have to ask a question, Do you want to own an asset at a 35 million dollar market cap with lots of growth potential or an asset at the 10 billion dollar market cap with lots of growth potential? The former has a lot of room for rapid growth, the latter has to necessarily slow down. UX, scalability issues and also long adoption arc will retard the growth of bitcoin. Getting to 100 billion is going to be a lot harder than getting to 10 billion in my opinion. For us to grow the same amount is a lower barrier.
Also in terms of things like miners, the VP is front loaded. You miners doesn't magically grow in value over time. It is a depreciating asset like most preordered products. Ether has to either die fast or grow fast.