The reason I mentioned peer reviewed research was more to provide context to the timeline and roadmap rather than to argue that it was better. Something I’ve seen a few times is that Cardano is a ghost chain which I don’t think is accurate given where they are at in their roadmap. If they don’t gain adoption after deploying smart contracts then they could become one but personally I don’t think that’s a fair characterisation at this point.
DPoS, staking, smart contracts, native tokens, metadata etc aren’t new but I do think there’s some interesting implementation details that make what Cardano are doing interesting.
Anyway, it’s not my intention to get into a religious war around crypto projects and I have no particular affiliation with Cardano or investment in it.