>Apples to oranges. The existence of traditional banking systems does not negate the demand for alternative systems with properties that traditional banking is incapable of providing.
I never argued this, what I'm saying is that it's fallacious to suggest that incumbent systems are not comparable to bitcoin, they are, because they compete to replace those systems in their feature-sets and are marketed as such by the stewards of these blockchain projects. Your reasoning is akin to suggesting that a Tesla can't be compared to a Hummer because it does not support the capability running on liquid fuel which has desirable properties such as high energy density and rapid refueling when compared to lithium batteries. Obviously they are not the same thing, but fuel density can be likened to decentralization in that it doesn't make a difference to the vast majority of people one way or the other as long as they can reliably get form point A to point B... except one vehicle fills the air with poison as a necessary byproduct of operation and the other does not which is clearly preferable if you don't care about fuel density (decentralization).
> no matter how inefficient _you_ might think the system is
It has nothing to do with what I think, the inefficiency is an objective fact and clearly demonstrable when you look at the numbers, your only argument seems to be "yes, one is more efficient than the other, but don't think about that because decentralization outweighs everything else"
> it's obviously still generating enough value to sustain itself otherwise it would cease to exist.
That's a tautology, "it exists so the prerequisite conditions for it to exist are obviously fulfilled". Just simply existing isn't a counterargument to criticism of waste.