In summary: PoW is a mechanism for fair coin distribution (of course, fairness still depends on the emission curve), while PoS is not (its creators start with 100% of all coins).
I am a random nobody, I was there at the time the Ethereum presale happened, and they were accepting purchases from people just like me.
In fact the presale was so open that it was drawing substantial criticism at the time. People were worried about the legal ramifications of them selling to literally any member of the public, without any KYC or vetting process. It was the polar opposite of selling to insiders.
That's aside from your metrics for the sale being wrong as well.
I was also there. Seemed like a scam, like all those other premined coins that were popular when ETH launched.
I stand by that assessment in 2025.
I guess technically if you had traded Bitcoin for ETH at launch and then back to Bitcoin before merge you could have made more sats than holding the sats alone. It’s true of many low cap tokens. But for anyone touching ETH since the merge, they have been burned.
We can marvel at the innovations introduced by the tech, yeah, contracts are interesting (yet still don’t seem to have a use case beyond accounting and tokens.. [primarily fiat stables]).