The world's largest energy wasting scheme is going to continue, with or without us.  Counterparty can certainly adapt if that ever looks like it's going to change.

PoS is still an emerging field.  IMO there are, shall we say, "issues" with all existing PoS implementations.  It hasn't been rigorously tested to nearly the same extent as PoW.  Most "PoS" coins out there are hybrid PoW/PoS anyway.  I do think that PoW will eventually be superseded by PoS, just for efficiency's sake, but when the time comes, Counterparty can just hop to the leading PoS coin instead of having to create one.

You are welcome to fork Counterparty if you feel so strongly about its direction.  Or move to one of the alternatives such as NXT, BitShares, or Ripple, all of which have their own take on the blockchain and protocol implementations.  I for one am somewhat invested in all of them, but I want to see them all succeed, and I really do like Counterparty from both a philosophical and technical standpoint.

I'm sure that the devs are flexible and will remain so, but the core idea for Counterparty was to build upon Bitcoin and leverage its security, its blockchain, its nodes, its miners.  They are not going to abandon that lightly.  It may come to that point some day, and they might already have some contingency plans in place, but it is still very early days and there's no reason to jump ship so quickly.  Rome was not built in a day.  IMO Counterparty is already winning the race, and the release of the Web Wallet will be a huge step up in average-end-user functionality.