Just from reading your comments, there appears, at least to me, a sort of bias toward EOS. I think that gives you your personal answer. Dan Miller is indeed the figurehead, but the project would not fall to the ground without him in the picture. It is simply too big to fall and they have a huge amount of funding to bring in the best and the brightest. Cardano has great research there is no doubt. However, just as you immediately dismissed NEO for being basically tailored to China, I see Cardano as being tailored toward Japan.
I personally can see alternatives to blockchain technology such as DAG/Tangle-based or a combination of the two as with PRL (utilizes IOTA Tangle and ETH blockchain) taking the lead under BTC in the near future.
Blockchain is certainly not going away and I do believe that EOS is where you want to focus your time/money on between those two.
Interesting thoughts, thank you. Yeah it seems I'm veering slightly to EOS but I'm still more or less on the fence.
One thing I forgot to mention was how easy the smart contact programming will be. I notice with Cardano it's stated it's "Haskell like". I've never programmed Haskell before but have a lot of experience with Python and Javascript. I'm also a Windows user mostly. I looked at EOS and it looked like it has a heavy preference for Linux users, whereas ADA more for Windows. Also hope we could discuss these points too.