Thanks.

"Smart contracts" are just code executing in a trustless environment. But that is irrelevant in a corporate / institutional settting where trusted execution is the default. Even getting the hierarchy to consider replacing trusted execution with its distributed, trustless version is a pain in the neck. So no, "smart contracts" are definitely the least useful feature of blockchains for corporates.

If you want my opinion, Fabric is an over-engineered architecture that responds to two rather contradictory design goals:

1. implementing functionalities that allows one to mistake it for a blockchain
2. allowing business to go about their "business as usual" while at the same time claiming that they are "disrupting themselves" and "doing blockchain

Besides, Fabric is not a product but a toolkit: you need a couple millions to get started and "everything is possible" ... because nothing is built-in. In their tutorials "Alice" can happily double-spend and spend money it doesn't have. When asked, they answer: "oh but you can implement that in business rules" (but forget to add: "provided you pay for X more man-days")

Looking at blockchains is a lot more fun when your horizon is a PhD thesis than when you are expected to deliver with a young and little proven technology and 250K€ a project estimated at 8M€ (32 times more) using a classical centralized architecture.