The lower fees derive from the medium used (crypto instead of traditional payment processors). You didn't need to involve a NFT to send crypto to the artist's wallet.

> acquiring ownership of an artist-signed asset, rather than a digital media file (the limited-edition token is cryptographically signed by the artist, the media file is not)

I'm going to refer to the rest of this comment thread about whether 'ownership' is a suitable word for having a cryptographic signature applied to your blockchain address, when the media file in question is bit-for-bit identical.

As you can guess, I hardly think so. There is nothing you can do as an 'owner' of a digital ape picture that anybody else who right-clicked it and saved it can't also do, with the possible exception of getting kudos from the artist for the money you gave them. But a simple donation would have had the same result.

> participating in a digital art community

Which hardly requires NFTs, only your involvement and communication. Online art communities go back to Elfwood.

> supporting decentralized systems, etc.

Tautology. "I use NFTs because I want to support the use of NFTs".

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> A simple way to frame Hicetnunc is a social media platform that is not driven by FAANG, advertising models, and "Like" buttons, but instead by artists, collectors, and OSS developers participating in a digital economy: selling and trading tokens, and also exploring ways to steward and maintain that work without solely relying on traditional centralized third-party services.

I'm a Fediverse user and I want to nuke the FAANGs, so I'm fully on board with promoting alternative, decentralized social networks. I just don't believe that adding glorified baseball trading cards to the recipe makes them better or stronger in any way.

I never heard anyone saying that Team Fortress 2 became a better community after it became an online market for ugly digital hats.