Ethereum is extremely elegant, and may end up being more important in this space than Bitcoin one day.
in terms of scaling, it's not particularly elegant. i'm actually a big fan of a lot of ethereum's functionality but it's total bloatware. if sharding were viable from a decentralization standpoint and implemented from the get-go in 2015, i might have a different view, but the difficulty in running an ethereum node (even today) seems like an extremely big problem.