One factor which was missing in this equation is "skin in the game"
I second your opinion. Although I abhor the waste of resources by proof-of-work, I have to give it exactly this advantage.
Thumbs up from me for your post in the ivory tower, a good read and exactly my way of thinking.
I too abhor the waste of resources by proof-of-work, but reality is not what is fitting our wishes, but what is fitting the laws of causality. As ethically perverse as it may be, proof-of-work happens to have this probably in the origins unintended feature of introducing a powerful deterministic skin-in-the-game variable into the mechanism. Once this principle becomes clear and acknowledged, it's up to the best minds in the crypto society to find out alternative ways to force efficient skin-in-the-game variables into less waistful networks as for example Obyte.
I can't comment on Ivory Tower board, but if you have $1 million or 100 BTC (doesn't matter if you inherited it or got it for cheap long time ago), isn't that a "skin in the game" too?
I mean, at some amount, large enough value would become a "skin in the game" because you wouldn't want the value to drop because you have too much "skin in the game" in that asset and you would lose more than those who have less of it.
Normally, you wouldn't see bigger TSLA investors talking sh!t about their cars. In cryptospace, you could see people talking sh!t about the alts they hodl, but that's probably because their bags are small, so they don't have enough skin in the game.
I think you got the Metcalfe's law wrong, it doesn't stop working when the tokens are airdropped. Wikipedia says: "Metcalfe's law states the effect of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected
users of the system". Originally, it was not in terms of users, but rather of "compatible communicating devices", but the amount of "users" seems to be more accurate for it. If you airdrop to addresses without them having to do anything then they are not users. If you distribute it to users, so they have to claim it or do something else in order to get it, they will be users just for the time period they claim it, but if they dump it or hodl it after that, they are not users.
Metcalfe's law was about telephones and it still applies. I still have landline telephone number, but I haven't used it for over 15 years. It's even connected now to my TV, so if somebody would call to it, it would pop-up on TV screen. Is landline telephone valuable in my country? No, because nobody uses it, everybody just has it for legacy reasons and because it doesn't cost anything to keep it because it comes with the TV package (all landline operators pivoted to ISPs).
Metcalfe's law worked for Obyte case too, people had to take part of the "Bytes to BTC holders distribution", airdrop is a misleading name for it. The network value went up, people had to link their addresses by making BTC transfer or by signing the message, but since they didn't convert into users, the Obyte value game down again. That doesn't mean that Obyte whales doesn't have "skin in the game", but I don't know any whales either who is talking sh!t about Obyte, it looks to me that the 2 biggest whales on Draw Airdrop will do anything to increase their GBYTE bags.