gen 2.0 PoS coins can and do more than legacy PoW coins, and use less energy too.
To be fair any of those feature can be done for POW coin too difference is that in POW
coin developers don't have so much motivation to hard work because miners can dump on them...
and devaluate their work while POS developers are building their kingdoms with vision in head.
POS coins usually like to make shock features which leads to PUMP but that feature in reality
can be ported between any other POW / POS coin on existing protocol.
DRK and anon is great example of feature race...
On blockchain you can make many magic tweaks also assent exchange p2p smart contracts ext...
gen 2.0 POS in real as "features" doesn't matter so much in that case
need fast protocol, low energy cost and low resource requirements and good security
those are challenges !
not pump features who no one in real use...
I do agree that features and the core of the protocol are entirely separate things. But not all features are worthless necesarrily. We'll see over time what features real people will use and which are just for show.
But yes, I agree with you that:
"fast protocol, low energy cost and low resource requirements and good security"
Are the most important things.