The 2017 bull run was based on hype that was why shitcoins were able to give more profit because they were cheaper and people bought it based on the huge hype in the market then
But the next bull will be quite different from that and it will be based on real life usage and adoption so any project or altcoin that doesn't offer real usage or solve a problem will beat the dust.
You are completely right about this, 2017 massive gain we had in altcoin market was as a result of the bitcoin hype which altcoins took advantage of also to hype their own altcoin and you could see most altcoin surge in price, but because of the way it came, they could not last or retain their high value for that long which they all crashed.
ICO will not be able to help again this time around because it has already had a damaged name and instead of it attracting people to it, many people are very scared of putting money into ICOS again. We need to push more for adoption as you said and we need to all collectively do that and at the same time also, there is need to still push for hype again because it has a way of really speeding up the level of adoption here.