I find your leap from "they haven't gotten the economics right yet" to "the status quo is the only way" concerning. Being VC backed means accepting an addition

I find your leap from "they haven't gotten the economics right yet" to "the status quo is the only way" concerning. Being VC backed means accepting an additional constraint: it has to be remotely controllable by a third party, and if the user revokes trust in that third party, it has to become useless. Otherwise there's nothing to own, nothing to leverage for a return on your investment. That places some pretty severe limits on how trustworthy such a piece of software can be. There's tremendous value in getting the economics right, even if we haven't yet.