It's easy to abandon the initial vision and go for an 'everything goes' type of project in the face of adversity. I can say from experience that selling an everything goes project to investors is a whole lot harder than one with specific goals; ie. blockchain that provides a censorship-free outlet to content creators whilst allowing them to monetize work. Doing an elevator speech about a blockchain where you can build some random dapp (which barely passes the threshold of logic) and incomprehensibly profit is a lot harder.

I understand why the shift took place: to allow for massive growth. We've seen the same change in virtually every project or product aimed for a narrow (or a wide swath of a narrow) market. Think video games.

Are you on Discord? You probably know I lost Slack access a while ago now.