This is an awesome perspective to hear. I'm a student who will be doing a year long research project, part of which will be on developing my own protocol to replace proof-of-work for our use case. During this time of planning, I've had to delve into a lot of research, where I've personally found that I am quite fond of proof-of-stake. It uses substantially less energy, simplifies the system, and allows for some new functionality that wasn't possible before. The system I'm designing for my research is a protocol that will be based on proof-of-stake in certain ways.