Oh, that was gmax's fault.
Did you get scammed?
Oh, that was blockstream's fault. If they'd just did X, then the scam wouldn't have happened in the first place.
Did your friend tell you something secretive that "only he knows" and it's "not public knowledge"?
Well obviously the core devs are behind it.
The absurdity is great when the altcoiners are staring at Bitcoin's behemoth economy with jealous eyes amplifying the narratives they sometimes even know are totally false.
More insidious of course are the lies that are false but simple, where the factually verifiable truth is directly contrary but complex, like the foolish lie about gmax stealing credit, or Vitalik asserting that he was planning Ethereum until the core devs blocked him.
It's easy for outsiders to be infected via their usual lines and information feeds. And, of course, Bitcoin has no marketing department, so obviously defence thereof is a long, painstaking process of careful dismantling and debunking over a long period of time.
Thankfully, the actually helpful, intelligent, and ultra-competent people that are the safest to align with are people on whom these kinds of lies are basically completely ineffectual, so we tend to win, in that respect, just by default.
Perhaps it is too late for replicating existing use cases. However, the general idea of running EVM-like smart contracts secured by Bitcoin PoW (e.g. merge mined sidechains) is still quite attractive
1. Network effects already on Ethereum
2. Bitcoin block time too slow and block size too low
3. Counterparty uses Bitcoin as a data layer, but Bitcoin itself cannot recognize Counterparty transactions, so Bitcoin consensus does not secure Counterparty transactions.
As such, you should know more than anyone how heated the OP_RETURN drama got, and how ANYONE using the BTC chain for anything other than moving money from point A to point B is a complete non-started and will be unanimously opposed by the core development team.
Core devs may not agree with what some users do with the system (current specs/features).. but as the Ethereum miners showed with increase in block size, core devs' philosophical objections may not matter in the end
Smart contracts are neat. Bitcoin is neat. Smart contracts on Bitcoin could have been a thing, but now it's too late. There is almost zero intersection between BTC maximalists and people who think smart contracts on BTC are a good idea.