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RE: The concept of an exocortex is similar to the invention of glasses
You might have misunderstood my because my point exactly was that they start out specialized, and then evolve into generalized iterations. Inventions are rarely made for "general" use cases because a specific problem is the catalyst of the invention itself. We don't use the bitcoin protocol for smart contracts, but the idea of smart contracts on the blockchain wouldn't exist without the bitcoin protocol.
Unfortunately I do not see Bitcoin moving into a general purpose direction. While I don't know what it will become, it's not in my opinion currently evolving toward that. Also I would say smart contracts were thought up long before Bitcoin. It is true that Bitcoin was the first implementation of many ideas but the main idea was Nakamoto consensus.
For 2008 Bitcoin was at the time the state of the art. Even in 2012 Bitcoin was still state of the art. I cannot say Bitcoin is state of the art in 2018.
This is exactly my point. :) Bitcoin is not state of the art anymore because the innovation it brought to a specific problem evolved into something more generic, namely smart contract platforms. However, the implementation of such smart contact platforms (which arguably won't even use Nakamoto consensus, the core innovation, upon their mainstream adoption) wouldn't be possible without the initial innovation of bitcoin.
By the way, why do you say "unfortunately"? Isn't it a good thing that new protocols are being built for new ideas? It would be sisyphean to keep mending old protocols that were designed for a different purpose.