They haven't made money "out of nothing", the money is paying for development. They've had running code since before the Ether sale. That code has been used in

They haven't made money "out of nothing", the money is paying for development. They've had running code since before the Ether sale. That code has been used in projects like Counterparty and Eris. It's already of value. Implementing a system in different languages ensures that, unlike Bitcoin, assumptions and bugs don't get baked in to a single codebase or development environment. It's a robustness measure and good software development practice (I'm disturbed by how few supposedly professional software engineers are familiar with this principle). Simply re-using Bitcoin code would work against this. Smart contracts can reduce legal costs in trusted transactions. And they're not just for replacing existing legal contracts. As for "real" exchanges vs. p2p, it depends what you're trading. Twenty years ago if we were discussing whether someone would one day sell a house on eBay I'm sure we'd be having a similar conversation. The development process for the final release isn't finished yet so if it's true that they've "failed to work around Bitcoin's shortcomings" that's something you should go into more detail about so it can be addressed.