I'm the organizer of the Silicon Valley Ethereum meetup; I.e. I'm very involved in one of the communities that you refer to. We see Ethereum as a very messy, crazy project with fallible leaders. I don't think that the DAO was handled especially gracefully, either in the lead-up to the hack or afterwards with the fork. We've had meetups [1][2] where speakers were very critical of the leadership.
In other words, for the case of our community, we see the developers of the clients and other employees of the foundation (i.e. the leadership) as fallible.
[1] https://www.meetup.com/EthereumSiliconValley/events/23305312...
[2] https://www.meetup.com/EthereumSiliconValley/events/23201229...
This line amuses me because I'm definitely a complete convert in the ethereum cult and I genuinely can't think of anything Vitalik has ever said that I don't agree with 100% [1]. but I can't help it, he's genuinely an insightful guy that happens to have sensible positions on most issues.
[1] OK he said some dumb things about quantum computing in 2010 when he was like 16 years old.
2. Transparent financial markets on arbitrary derivates (like etherdelta.com)
3. Eventually, people authoring and managing their own content, instead of acting as free labor to generate advertising revenue for Twitter/Facebook/etc
2. SEC & IRS will be a roadblock there, eventually.
3. I don't see why blockchain is necessary for that.
I fail to see why ethereum would be the only & best solution here for those cases. I just don't see anything special about it, at best its an unscalable and insecure medium given what we've seen in the past with DAO (now starting another one!) and subsequent editing of blockchain ledger (effectively signaling distributed consensus is not possible with profiteering mixed in).
I think you've hit the nail on the head with this one. Cryptocoin communities have reached a religious cult status. Ethereum is a good example of this. It's leaders are seen as infallible and omnipresent. Any criticism or voice of reason are quickly silenced and shunned as "shills for bitcoin".
You are absolutely right that it's impossible to engage in a meaningful dialogue with such people who have such constricted views of reality. It's a waste of time and I'm going to cut it out.