But that isn't what The DAO was advertising. It was "code is law", which was supposed to remove the element of messy human judgement from things.
Of course, it was a spectacular failure because nobody actually really wants "code is law"... instead all they did was re-invent mob rule and those with the loudest voices decided what to do about the "theft".
IMO Ethereum did something that would be really nice to be able to do in the real world. A chain split, each participant got their resources on each side of the split (except the hacker) and each person got to choose which one to support, or both.
There was no need to bend to the "loudest voices" as to what to do with the theft, but rather to create two parallel chains and let each individual decide.
But the DAO contract specifically said, “we are bound by the results of this state machine, and it takes precedence over any human description of it”, and then wanted take-backsies as soon ask they didn’t like the result.
I much prefer this interpretation. I think this should be considered ipso facto legitimate use of the contract.
The more frequent these contract "failures" become the more suspicious I am that the authors of the contract themselves are the ones exploiting them.
It's an obvious scam in this frothy market: introduce a contract with an intentional defect and then exploit it yourself.
Again, I am tempted to consider this a legitimate use of the contract.