People mostly email me about very specific topics. Nobody "still doing research™" about the broad topic of crypto is getting anywhere because they get bounced from the funnel immediately and paint the whole space with an equally as broad brush. Its decade 3 and this is where we are, so what do people really want to know? To me, there's lots of killer apps, to others I don't really care to debate any longer, who cares about "mainstream" when there's already 2-3 trillion dollars of value to attract to any product you release. It's not 2009 any more when most of this level of depth (or lack thereof) was relevant.

I personally wouldn't know where to point you, and sadly its more likely you too will run into disillusioning use cases from your own exploration (or wind up in a cult to bolster an implementation that is going nowhere). For me, it's been more interesting to accept that no state of the these technologies is set in stone, that I can influence the future state, and that the monetary incentives to build and influence the future state are phenomenal. Better option than smugly exploiting myself at an adtech conglomerate, for less money.

There is room for more specific things to be discussed, like if you look at the frontpage right now, there is a thread about "Deserializing JSON fast" or "A comparison of Rust and Zig". There could just as easily be discussions about "Solidity vs Vyper" or a thread every time a new version of one of those languages used in Ethereum Virtual Machines is out. Or node technology and processing transactions faster. Things that can inspire, but instead we just get these broad think pieces from wannabe angel investors and some influential VCs. As this is what makes it, it shows that this isn't the community to expect a deeper discussion right now.