My view is that actual smart contracts are very useful and can play a role, often for bridge purposes in interacting with native functions of the chain such as access control, token movement, etc.

Almost every single blockchain including Bitcoin (almost the poster child for simplicity and stability over functionality) has at least some limited form of smart contracts. They're very useful for bridge purposes such as atomic swaps, token exchanges, adapters to lightning-network-like solutions, for security features such as time locks, two/multi-factor authentication without custody, etc. This does not mean that you build an entire application into the blockchain and expect consensus nodes to verify it for you for free, but there are portions of many applications that are useful for the core blockchain to support natively without the hard coding, risking the stability of the core chain, and hard forking the way we have been doing it.

I think we should stop hating on real smart contracts and should embrace them (with appropriate controls on resource use and bloat via RCs) in addition to soft consensus, not keep trying to pitch soft consensus as an alternative. For many applications it is, but for many others (at least not without great difficulty and enormous unforced marketing challenges) it is not.

We are marginalizing ourselves unnecessarily by trying to convince developers they don't need something they think they need. The better approach is to give them both and let them choose the tool they want to use.