Why is Ethereum a joke? It seems to do exactly what you are trying to, and you just discount it?
Look at the DAO. It's more than enough reason to dismiss this as a libertarian capitalist's experiment, with straight up dictatorialism if they don't get their way.
Do you support Ethereum Classic and consider "being hacked by the DAO hack" == "things not going [their] way"?
Just curious.
Yes, it sucks that they did not write tighter code and allowed a gotcha.... But when that happens in the legal world, people do pay for it.
Instead, because one of founders put up a lot of ETH, they changed the rules of the game. Now, the question is, "How close to the CEO of ConsenSys do you need to be to roll out bad contracts?".
That's what makes it worthless.
The change in Ethereum was "voted" for by a majority of hash power (but of course as influenced by the Ethereum leadership, so people had the popup in the client along with a recommendation what to vote for). So isn't that correction also in the spirit of Ethereum? Miners decide.
How about fixing obvious bugs, but otherwise upholding contracts?
To elaborate, it's especially hard to trust ETH code because it's not provable in any way. Bugs will hide, and people will find them. If ETH wasn't turing-complete this would be less problematic (because static analysis would be much easier, and possible), but as it stands there's no way to trust Ethereum contracts.
The rules aren't: "the code is the contract".
The rules are: "the code that is accepted by a majority of hashing power is the contract."
As someone who has tried to build a simple DAPP on bitcoin, my god, this is not what bitcoin was meant to do. I mean I love bitcoin, but building smart contracts on bitcoin is like using a screwdriver to implement a calculator.
Bitcoin took a route which isn't suited for things which Ethereum wants to achieve. A great example of this is Augur vs Truthcoin/Hivemind. The team behind former looked at Bitcoin first, but realized how much difficult it would be for them to build this on bitcoin so they went Ethereum route and now they are very close to their alpha, where as Truthcoin/Hivemind went nowhere.