If the notion for this coin and its technology were in the hands of someone capable, someone who could have made these things happen, could it have been useful? 
I'm struggling to see which part of it has any practical use or benefit. Debit cards? Maybe. Although there are some other businesses working on that and apparently it's not as easy or convenient as it sounds.
Or to put it another way, there are plenty of capable people "in this industry". Some are working on bitcoin infrastructure, some are trying to create their own coins - and the failure rate of those is telling us something, isn't it? For someone to come without any resources and to try to lie their way into something like that is ridiculous to say the least.
Yep, so why do the remaining GAW faithful put their hopes behind someone with no industry experience other than reselling other companies miners?
I don't know the answer to it, but I guess that if you promise someone the magic of a ponzi with the assurances that it is not a ponzi, one too many people will buy into it.
They had successfully hyped up the price of Prime Hashlets from $16 (or even $10 if you converted Vaultbreakers) all the way up to $30-$50. I think that may have been a part of the reason why some chose to believe in this new project. To some extent it even worked - the profit part of it, not the "change the world" part - if you weren't too greedy and sold XPY at $14. Ironically the die-hard believers got screwed the most as they kept buying and holding. All those nice things about crypto adoption etc are meaningless because GAW chose to market it as a profit vehicle and did nothing to quell the enthusiasm about the fictional $20 floor.
tl;dr: greed.
OR ARE THEY NOT BACKED MY REAL MINERS OMG 
