OP, I fully understand where you're coming from, what with bitcoin being extremely environmentally wasteful, but that may be necessary to give it a base value, if nothing else. You need something like a production cost assigned to it, so there can be a reference to its fundamental value. With PoW mining , while primitive, it at least has a direct way to assign a production cost to it: electricity.
But however better cryptocurrency can be improved, it's not that there aren't alt coins that have better solutions and better technology than bitcoin, yet they still don't and can't overtake much less replace bitcoin. There's also the adoption and infrastructure, which is what really gives bitcoin its value. Bitcoin's first mover advantage really can't be simply overlooked or dismissed. The solution is not to create another alternate coin, but to just fully concentrate on Bitcoin and how to evolve it to be something better.
It's foolish if costs are being driven up by a method that has no gain. For instance, if Volkswagens would be made in a way that they are disassembled and reassembled 10 times before they come out, then it sure would drive up the production costs together with the price. It would also give people more work for doing it. But will it improve the quality of the product or improve anything at all? No.
In the future, the use of money should be cheap, without any artificially added costs. Currently is the time where the banking sector is using it's dominance to artificially add costs to their offered services. I believe that the future will be better, not worse, like it would be with bitcoin.
The fundamental properties of bitcoin, like PoW mining and fixed coin supply can't be changed because of the trust issues that would arise. That is the reason why the developers aren't considering touching these parts. They know that trust would be lost if fundamental rules would be changed. So, the only option is to move wealth to new cryptos that are already built on more advanced fundamental properties.
That isn't the same as bitcoin mining, your Volkswagen analogy. That's doing for the sake of doing things repeatedly, and that is indeed stupid and inefficient. While for the mining of bitcoin using cryptography, the millions and millions of hashes are required to find the right hash function to solve a block to be able to give out bitcoins. Brute-forcing is the only way to go, as long as cryptocurrencies are based on, duh, cryptography.
The trust issues regarding the fundamentals of bitcoin, to me, is not as sacred as you implied that if developers change Bitcoin's fundamentals all trust would be lost. If people have trust in it, people would just accept it. Take the hard fork of March 2013. Majority of miners agreed to the fork and the problem was solved and it's business as usual. Unless you want to speculate on other cryptos for extra monetary gains, or have personal principles (such as the PoW system being energy wasting) against Bitcoin, by all means get out of and go into the others, but Bitcoin is not going to disappear or be abandoned, not for the reasons you cited.
Money should be cheap if only to encourage spending. And to be honest I personally do not see Bitcoin as currency as much as a store of value. Which is why I don't really feel appropriate calling Bitcoin a crypto
currency. It's more like digital gold. Like gold, you don't use your gold to buy stuff, you sell your gold for fiat to buy stuff.
