Ordinals is a good example. I may not like dick pics and fart sounds in the blockchain, but it's impressive, for Bitcoin as a protocol, that Casey Rodarmor built his project on top of the network without asking permission. This is the ethos Bitcoin lives by, and saying that it's merely for "spending" cheapens the protocol.
I'm just referencing Satoshi's original intentions. He didn't create bitcoin to be an investment, even though somewhat ironically that's possibly one of the reasons why its had such success as one.
But here we are.
The easy way out of the debate is "because Satoshi", or "because the white paper".
Ordinals is indeed a novel use case that doesn't have to do with spending, so is the stuff I've been doing on Counterparty since 2014. I think what "cheapens the protocol" to a larger degree is insisting bitcoin shouldn't be spent.
I truly respect your opinion, but not finding out the actual reason why saving Bitcoin makes more sense than spending it like it was a network merely for coffee transactions, makes me believe that we might have only started to scratch the surface.
I'm also still in my Bitcoin journey, and I'm not saying that I'm 100% on the right path. Perhaps I will get a new understanding and agree with you one day.