This isn't the business world. That is the entire crux of this problem: Projection of a competitive business environment onto this arena.

Before crypto, it was really really easy to build value by selflessly putting time and energy into creating open source products. Often, the creators of said value had no way of capturing any value for themselves.

With crypto, the system we have now automatically captures value because the coins gain value. Selfless open source programmers can generate value without having to capture it and they're still guaranteed to make money because they have stake in the network.

There are also a bunch of other things like being able to subvert regulations (like gambling/banking)... the point is that the vast majority of value in these platforms is the quantity and quality of the community members in them. We actually can afford to not be innovative and just copy other chains and be just fine in the long run... However unidealistic that scenario is.