Aeternity took so many shortcuts when building the blockchain that it is very difficult for them to provide basic features that Ethereum accomplished in 1 year. Ethereum was a novel blockchain with many new features. You could expect Aeternity to be a superior in terms of features, development speed, and tech stack, when you take a consideration that it received massive ICO fundings  received more fundings in ICO:

- Aeternity received ~25 millions of USD in BTC and ETH
- Ethereum received $16 millions of USD in BTC

The question is what happened this massive ICO funding as Yanislav Malahov and Nikola Stojanow never revealed that and banned people who asked that. Now Aeternity is in a development starvation and after so many years still have no basic features that Ethereum had in 1 year with smaller funds!

The problem with Aeternity is that it is deeply connected with Erlang language while Ethereum was language agnostic. Aeternity has just one implementation in Erlang. Ethereum has many implementations in C++, Go, Python, JS. Why it is so important? Because when you are language agnostic everything is specified in with a high level of abstraction and it is easy to implement part of the protocol in many languages. This way you can read and write the state of the smart-contracts for example in a web browser. You can see what is going to be signed, what data has been compiled to feed to the smart-contract and what the response is. You don't need to ping a server, the code in your web browser can do this and all of this was achieved within 1 year! Aeternity is contrast despite more funding received can't achieve that after several years! As I said the its protocol implementation is so highly related to Erlang that they decided to transpile Erland to JS to run parts of the protocol in a web browser. This way they hope the would be able to run smart contracts in a web browser, compile data and decode it. It is not done yet, the development is so slow an unpredictable that many companies just abandoned developing on Aeternity, they have decided it is too big risk for them as the Aeternity is immature, not stable, prone to the 51% attacks and with no good standard of development tools.