You're definitely right that there are some terrible projects.
My main point is you can accumulate more coins by swing trading without using much cash.
Are you a software engineer? Not trying to use the appeal to authority fallacy on you. There are some great innovations with practical use cases, decentralised data shortage being one example.
Whether bitcoin should back it is debatable? Most of my crypto stake is off exchange and BTC. So am totally wanting BTC to succeed. Haven't touched it in years.
The precious metals points, agree on one thing. The inability for fort knox to be audited really brings it into question.