Calling it a simple clone of ether is a little bit too much, because if peoples are seeing it from this kind of people. Basically everything is a simple clone of Bitcoin, most of them or all of them were created based on Bitcoin source. About future nobody knows it, it has a potential to be one of the top cryptocurrency.
Not only it is more centralized, it is also more cancerous (in term of community) compared to other cryptocurrency. Their community keep telling us that they are the best cryptocurrency in the world while their nodes and network are dying.
Reason why it is very popular, it is because a lot of project was created based on ETH smart contract. There is no way they would FUD it and leaving it alone, they need it to run their smart contract.
(Compared to ETH, for me NEO is more reliable and faster. But both of them are centralized coin)