Plenty wrong with tokens but I would remember that VC funding also comes with a lot of drawbacks and, in my opinion, is what is holding technical progress back. I am in a startup and VCs are preventing us from focusing on longer term goals like interoperable protocols. The VC game is simple - fund a "disrupting" company aka an extractive monopoly and cash out. In that light, even though we took VC funding some sort of cautious yet fair token raise would have made sense, it'd allow us to work out the product without compromising on longer term goals.

I understand the distrust for blockchain but there is also ideology in blockchain world that has not yet occurred in the greater world, that funding is broken and new alternatives are needed. Has somebody figured a perfect one - no. Is experimentation good? Yes.