Last days I was thinking about how market is evaluating projects. How people makes their financial decision (especially in crypto market).
I found out that the more real value project has (real value like $$ from selling electricity to every citizen in a country) the lesser its price is compared to value and the less volatile and exiting the chart is. Just simple scenario. If you see that company with 1 mln $ annual profit, 5% divident, with little perspectives to increase profit in next years (f.e company sells electricity to every citizen in a country, it will not sell more) and its price pumps 10x you know what to do ... short/sell definitely not buy because you see that it is overvalued. You use fundamential analysis indicators. P/E or P/BV. You see that percentage of divident is going down. You know what to do.
Fundamental analysis of trying to put a value to a stock on the basis of potential earning is a method used by mature investors. Yet, even in the stock market, you can find stocks which are way overpiced in terms of their P/E due to the hype around them or the personality cult of their founders. TSLA is probably the best example of this.
Crypto amplifies these phenomena ridiculously. There is soooo much vaporware that if a project shows even a little bit of progress in terms of launching a website, managing a community and having an active TG/ Discord, that is generally enough to increase the price in the bull-market. If the project has a celebrity founder who seems sincere in his delusions about making the best blockchain (Charles Hoskinson), then you have projects like ADA pumping without any product and usage.
Why people rush to buy such assets. Promises of product evaluated higher than products that already are here and works. From my experience such products pumps to the moon and crash weeks before releasing product. Leaving investors with crashing price and product that no one is using.
You are right about the constant copy pasting of open source projects. This is why, in time we'll have essentially no truly open-source, decentralized projects except Bitcoin. All of these others are vulnerable to take-overs and FUD attacks. There only salvation is actually having a unique product. For example what the first AMMs did. If its not unique, its not going to survive.
This brings us to the old question. How to ensure returns in the long term? I think the first thing needed is focus as an investor. You'll hear so many stories of easy money being made by insincere shills and influencers, that you'll find it hard to focus in this market. This makes you further miss the opportunities. I have experienced this personally. IMO, the best way is to find some niche that actually interests you. Then start following a few projects that are sincere about the "financial innovation" aspect. Being part of the community in actual projects gradually opens up other opportunities. I personally find it impossible to follow pumps and dumps and just gamble with a shit-ton hoping to strike gold. I know people for whom this has worked. But my luck has never been that good. That is why, the best method still is to stick with the fundamentals like OP lamented in the beginning of this post. Sooner or later, this works.