Creating a better Bitcoin has already been done to death and none of them have the success that Bitcoin has.
you are confusing "claims" (or advertisement) with "actions". it is very easy to claim to be better and in the eyes of most people it may look better (check top 10 altcoins!) but to actually be better you'll need some innovation and to go in an entirely different direction than bitcoin. in short when you see there is a ton of similarities between bitcoin and another altcoin, there is a good chance they are worse than bitcoin!
why? because they take the idea that works perfectly well with bitcoin and try to adapt it to their own purpose and it doesn't work that way.
Ethereum with its universal machine is just a disaster, an exemplary case of a very bad design choice,
it was perfect design choice, you are only mistaken about the purpose. ethereum was never meant to be "universal machine" it was just their advertising technique. the reality was ethereum was a premined coin with a big ICO to make the creators of it millionaires overnight. the design was chosen in that way to give it that short term advantage and hype to get the biggest pumps.
the developers have to be really stupid to not know seconds apart blocks will lead to a bloat of nearly 3 TB blockchain!