Ethereum slowed to a crawl as soon as people started trading kittens on it. And I remember seeing transaction fees in the hundreds of dollars when popular ICOs

Ethereum slowed to a crawl as soon as people started trading kittens on it. And I remember seeing transaction fees in the hundreds of dollars when popular ICOs were happening. Which probably didn't help you if you were stuck on one of the exchanges which simply turned Ethereum processing off in times of high load. Not inspiring confidence in the statement that it is faster than other systems. Compared to Bitcoin it is off by a constant factor, and constant factors aren't really what we're interested in here. Storing an economy in a fully replicated global ledger has its limitations, there's no getting around that.