ICO/IPO/ITO are all high risk/high reward. If you do your research they can be big money makers. Yes, a demo would help, but it can be faked just as easily as a lot of other things. As always, DYOR.
I agree demo isn't proof of anything, same as working wallet - if it has no awesome innovative feature, wallet is a copy paste job, you don't even need to know c++ to do it.
Lets say someone invested a few BTC in to an ICO/IPO/ITO or whatever ... how is that different from buying a few BTC worth of any altcoin on the market?
95% of coins has absolutely no use except for trading.