Probably. After all, Ripple is known to bring "hype" to the XRP cryptocurrency. At times, I've seen XRP surpass ETH in terms of market cap as a result of a quick boost in price. Surprisingly, the "centralized coin" has managed to retain its place as the third-largest cryptocurrency in the world. The smart contracts feature might boost XRP's price in the short term (if it's ever implemented on the distributed ledger). Here, XRP will gain a competitive advantage against ETH as it'll be able to process smart contracts efficiently at low costs. The unparalleled performance for "decentralized applications" might attract mainstream businesses, startups, and companies into it.
I believe that the reason why Ripple has acquired "Flare Networks" for the XRP Ledger is to increase use cases of the cryptocurrency in the mainstream world. With a smart contract system, XRP will be able to experience mainstream adoption like never before. Of course, I'm not quite fond with XRP's centralization issues. But it seems to be the perfect system for businesses and Banks to perform transactions at the fastest speeds and lowest costs possible.
Despite this, everyday people will prefer to use Ethereum or any other decentralized cryptocurrency for obvious reasons. Even if decentralized cryptos are slow and expensive to use at times, they're the best thing around when it comes to preserving one's financial sovereignty. Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other decentralized cryptocurrencies are battle-tested and resistant against manipulation, fraud, and other risks of centralization. They've sacrificed scalability in exchange for security, reliability, and censorship-resistance. That's something XRP lacks because it focuses on scalability than anything else. It's no secret that Ripple has frozen funds from the XRP Ledger in the past. A system like this is perfect for aforementioned entities (especially governments and central banks) but not for the average person. If XRP becomes a success with its smart contracts platform, it might take the Fintech industry by storm. Otherwise, it'll be just another speculative "cryptocurrency" doomed to failure. Just my thoughts