Even today most icos are asking for too much money to try to develop their projects, satoshi did not asked anyone for money when he was developing bitcoin and he delivered a functional currency, most icos today do not even take the time to write their own white paper and do not have any new ideas to try to make the market to move forward, so paying any price other than zero for most coins is a mistake since you are paying too much for something that is not worth anything.
When most of them does not even have passion for whatever project they believe they are developing, a lot of them sees ICOs now as money making scheme and engage the innocent investors without having a brilliant ideas on how to move the project forward.
But, I fault investors that are gullible enough to commit their hard earned money because I dont think someone that suffered to get his or her money would open his eyes wide without studying a project and researching on them very well before investing.
I agree that investors are in part to blame for what it is happening and that is because they have a similar vision to the developers of most projects, they are not really interested in the technology they are only looking for profits and while there is nothing wrong with that this means they are not really looking at the merits of a project when they invest, they are only interested in how fast the project in which they invested can attract more investors but if the project has no quality eventually no more money will be invested in the coin and then it will crash and it will never recover as the developers abandon the project.