Unfortunately there is a lot of politics involved in the crypto industry, even within individual project communities, and your experiences show that clearly. I wish there wasn’t, but that’s the reality. I also try to ignore it as much as possible, preferring to just code and make as much forward progress as I can. I leave dealing with crypto politics to my business partner @thecryptodrive , who is quite adept at maneuvering through those waters.

Regarding ICOs, I think you are absolutely right that most of them will end up worthless. What we’re going through now feels somewhat analogous to the Internet boom at the turn of the century. But a handful of these ICOs will survive, most likely the ones with true utility tokens. Just as a handful of those early Internet companies survived and prospered. EOS would count as a utility token since it represents a user’s fair allocation of network resources and is thus required to power apps and provide storage. In that sense it’s a generalization of Steem, which grants users transaction bandwidth (in addition to its obvious utility of being used for voting).

Regulators want to protect the public and reduce the potential for money laundering / terrorist financing. But I don’t believe they want to stifle the crypto industry if they don’t have to. Existing platforms such as Ethereum will probably be grandfathered in, further unlawful ICOs will be brought to heel, and future ones will fit into a regulatory framework. Already we see efforts underway to make a clear distinction between utility tokens and security tokens. Vice (a Steem fork) and Social Wallet (a Pivx fork), are two ongoing ICOs which are explicitly defining themselves as utility tokens and following guidelines from their legal teams to avoid encouraging any speculation as to future token price. They aim to be fully compliant in so far as that’s possible while policies continue to evolve.

And there has been positive news about legislation being drafted in Wyoming to firm up state laws regarding treatment of utility tokens. If passed, these laws would set an important precedent at the state level and could potentially lead to more favorable treatment at the federal level: https://www.google.co.jp/amp/www.newsweek.com/wyoming-cowboy-state-poised-today-become-blockchain-valley-828124%3famp=1

I won’t speculate about Wall Street “buying out” regulators, but at the very least I think they want to cooperate and work with regulators to hash out the best deal possible to bring cryptocurrency into the fold in a way that doesn’t cripple this nascent industry. Ultimately that will hasten the coveted mainstream adoption that so many crypto fans want to see, even if there are some short term pain points to be endured first.