Community support is very important for crypto adoption, ....*SNIP*I believe that there is so much room to grow in both the crypto and (eventually) mainstream spaces that everyone who invests in crypto right now (be it NXT, BTSX, Qora, BTM...) is probably going to profit.
Your two positives for NXT AE are fallacies. NXT wasn't the first mover advantage, colored coins was discussed long before NXT was ever heard of and was implemented by Mastercoin I believe. Community support isn't that important in the long term in fact it can be a hindrance to going mainstream at some point. The crypto community is a very small group of people in the big picture of things, if asset trading is to become the 'new decentralised stock market' then we are in germination season only. I like to give the example of MySpace for NXT but I have warned them many times that they complicate things and have too many moving parts and a cluttered sprawling leadership that might hinder it from the mainstream......like MYSpace did.
In reply; colored coins / AE may have been discussed before, (like pretty much every basic feature of NXT and most 2nd gen. cryptos) but NXT's implementation of AE has spawned a growing eco-system of assets, funds, and businesses on a scale that no other AE has achieved so far.
The basic AE functionality is being built upon by several 3rd parties to create more advanced applications (like Multigateway, Coinomat, SuperNet, SecureAE), so I'm quite happy to claim that NXT AE has the first mover advantage.
Community support a hindrance? I don't see it. We should, of course, always try to push the adoption of crypto to the mainstream, and the more people on the job, the better.
I think you may be missing two of the core points of NXT: the first is that NXT itself is relatively simple, but stable, secure and powerful software. The complicated stuff is being built on top of NXT itself, often by 3rd parties.
NXT is as complex as the user demands: if you want to just store and transfer NXT, you can. If you want to build a galaxy spanning SuperNET to take over the entire crypto world....you can do that as well.
As for the leadership thing......NXT has no real leaders, and thats the way most of us like it. NXT is always intended to be as open and decentralised as possible, and that extends to not having a leadership structure, to allow every member of the community to have a voice and to contribute in whatever way they want.
NXT will finally have the voting system up (soon) so that may make community decision-making quicker, but probably won't cut down on the arguments much....