I never understood the point of smart contracts. Why not just launch a new blockchain or decentralized application by forking code and launching nodes? That way you don't need to pay Ethereum fees and you get a lot more flexibility - Also, your project will not be constrained by Ethereum's scalability limits and you won't have to pay fees to subsidize the popularity of other projects which are running on the same platform... Ethereum seems to facilitate mostly short term scams.
Projects launch, raise a ton of money, then when people try to actually use the new project, they realize they have to pay $20 per transaction. This quickly kills the project; now onto the next scam. What kind of brand new project can justify making their users pay $20 per transaction? I struggle to think of any genuine use case.
Because contracts can call other contracts in the same transaction if they are on the same chain. This is what is known as "composition", and it's very handy for building powerful apps on existing proven primitives (such as aggregators, decentralized exchanges, lending protocols). Also, once you launch a contract on Ethereum, it's accessible to millions who already have an Ethereum wallet with ETH loaded. On-boarding to a new chain would be more of an uphill battle.
If you're worried about tx fees, there are already plenty of L2 solutions available and more coming online soon!
Projects launch, raise a ton of money, then when people try to actually use the new project, they realize they have to pay $20 per transaction. This quickly kills the project; now onto the next scam. What kind of brand new project can justify making their users pay $20 per transaction? I struggle to think of any genuine use case.