Hi, @retailtrader I'm an XRP investor. I bought a few thousand XRP right before it boomed back in April/May and I've made good profits out of it.

I believe that the main concern about XRP has always been the "lack of decentralization" as you have mentioned in your post, however, I think it only takes a bit of research to realize that this issue is only a matter of time, Ripple has mentioned multiple times that they are promoting partnerships to create more Validators and Nodes which help with this problem.

You can find this information also on their blog https://ripple.com/insights/how-we-are-further-decentralizing-the-ripple-consensus-ledger-rcl-to-bolster-robustness-for-enterprise-use and you can see the state of the network (validators and nodes) on https://xrpcharts.ripple.com/#/topology

I have to agree that it is not a very "exciting" coin to invest on like ETH, after all, the main users will be large corporations, banks and gateways, however, I've been working in banking, close to payment systems for a few years and I can see very clearly how much of a hassle it is to rely on tools and organizations like SWIFT to support the current international payment business and I believe that Ripple and XRP are solving a big problem with a low cost that hopefully can also benefit the average people that has the need of performing such international transactions.