I don't think it's an excessive focus on BTC technology, so much as that BTC abstracts the core issues to their fundamental essence and forces the tradeoffs on

I don't think it's an excessive focus on BTC technology, so much as that BTC abstracts the core issues to their fundamental essence and forces the tradeoffs on those terms, without obfuscating them. For instance, POW is extremely clear: you make a sacrifice to create blocks / mint transactions. It's almost biblical -- the game theory doesn't work without the sacrifice, and sacrifice is, tautologically, a tradeoff of one precious thing for another. All other crypto projects either want free lunch someplace, or make very different tradeoffs and assumptions.