This is a false equivalency. "Meat-space" contracts aren't executable programs that can unexpectedly, anonymously, and irreversibly drain your bank account of 100 million dollars based on a legal technicality. In "meat-space" the legal system would have very easily halted this insanity instead of forking the entire banking system to evade the consequences of a single agreement. Smart contracts provided no benefit but severe consequences when the risks materialized.
There's risks of theft and mismanagement of funds in crowd-funding companies.
This is another false equivalency, "theft and mismanagement" is always a risk when you're lending people money, that's not the problem; the issue is smart contracts which add the additional risk of random hackers stealing all your money with impunity, a risk not present in "meat-space".
>* Paypal has frozen and seized many individual and project accounts*
Irrelevant.
> credit card companies are forbidden to let you donate to Wikileaks
Irrelevant.
> And hackers could still steal or burn some or all funds. And there's essentially no useful recourse here either. Sometimes the courts get revenge for us, but we're still usually out of pocket.
This is totally wrong. That kind of thing just doesn't happen. If a hacker steals your money the bank has an obligation to make you whole and the courts will absolutely see to it that you are made whole, especially if we're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars.
> And a smart-contract with shares would offer a ton of features "for free". People could transfer ownership of their support (and the perk it represents), for example. And users could have total control of their promised funds until each phase comes due, via an escrow with an agent they trust.
I've already explained why it's not "for free", but you haven't demonstrated "tons of features". Escrows and agents already existed long before smart contracts, so that's not a useful feature.
The bottom line is, smart contracts are an absurdly complex solution looking for a problem, of which some probably exist, but the DAO was not an example of one.