All of that without a popular usecase yet. Except for financial speculation, finance-of-last-resort, and crime.
I would say that laboratory is not using the research grants well.
When you can't open a bank account, are discriminated against by institutions, live in highly authoritarian environments etc. This type of finance is not a "last resort" it's your first resort.
The reason it's not "popular" however you want to define it is simply a matter of time and not function.
Asking about use-cases for crypto is like asking for use-cases for the internet in the 90s. It's so general purpose that there isn't a specific use-case to sell you on but instead a set of smaller use-cases that add up to a large use-case.
For example, I would love for charities to be built on crypto. Many of the larger charities only use a small percentage of their funds on the problem they're trying to solve. I'd love to see exactly what my charitable donation is being used for. Luckily crypto is public and therefore publicly auditable.
I could list off similar use-cases and each one doesn't seem to be a big deal. But put together it's a huge change in how we view the world.
And as for your other arguments like crime, these don't match up with actual data. Crypto being public is a large turn-off for criminals so they tend to prefer cash instead.
They have already released the first of three phases. It's live now. I currently have some ETH on the new Proof of Stake chain. Second phase (where they merge it with the rest of the network) got pushed back a few months recently, but it's still expected Q1/Q2 2022[1].
I see and expect this argument from people who aren't in software, who expect everything to happen perfectly and instantly. But you should have been involved in enough projects to know you can't just Thanos snap a major software upgrade into existence.
Gamers: "No problem. Take the time you need to make it good."
Crypto developers (who are responsible for billions of dollars): "We need to push back the release date"
Techies: "How dare you. I'm going to imply you're incompetent even though I don't follow the development process at all."
Experiment away! But not with mega-scale proof-of-work projects that consume ungodly resource as a byproduct of securing the network (which is a financial problem in any case)
Are you familiar with any methods to achieve the same characteristics of Bitcoin but without PoW? Perhaps the energy is not the issue, perhaps it's your view to the importance of it.