> ~23,000 people who blindly jumped on the hypetrain
I haven't touched ETH or the DAO personally, but it is unfair to label every investment in them irrational. Over the past 5 years cryptocurrencies have provided multiple opportunities to convert, say, $10k into $100k or even $1M within a year or two; once your networth exceeds a certain amount, risking 1-2% of it on an opportunity like that is arguably wise - i.e. would be worth repeating - even if it does fail spectacularly.
It is certainly true that as long as that reasoning delivers 10-100x+ returns to some of the people some of the time, a giant fount of speculative money will continue to moisten a lot of scammers, con artists, and insufficiently-careful SW developers though.
So Slock.it could raise money, obviously. A common complaint right around when Slock.it launched the DAO was that Slock.it planned to offer the first funding proposal on it but only provided a brief 2-week period for review and debate before the voting started. It had the appearance of an attempt at railroading the crowdfunding process for a quick payoff.
Fortunately cooler heads uncovered the problems and spoke out, putting the brakes on. Now it's a big learning experience for the ~23,000 people who blindly jumped on the hypetrain and put money into a flawed investment vehicle. You'd think the first 7 years of Bitcoin would have taught people a lesson that this technology is risky, but dollar signs in the eyes tend to obscure hindsight I guess.