Why bust your ass to make interesting NFTs if the market's not gonna be able to tell anyway?

Do you mean the technical or the visual part of the NFTs? The protocols are great and make incredible things possible. Unfortunately, these are hardly noticed. It is reduced to the visual. very sad.

cartadao.io | Carta DAO is a limitless space for Web3, where Digital Collectibles and Coins meet the power of DeFi

Good observation. I see it the same way. The best thing about it is the open standards, which at least theoretically enable interoperability. External marketplaces reduce everything to the visual and the price offers / floor prices, etc. ..

.. that was never enough for us. integrated marketplaces according to AMM with additional features were needed. A lot of work, which is also fun to build from the tech side, but is still too little used, unfortunately.

for me the only side of the 2x2 that matters is the tech side

the visual layer might be relevant to whether it's interesting as art but not relevant to whether it's interesting as an NFT

the tech layer is relevant to whether it's an interesting NFT but marketplaces ~entirely obfuscate this bit