One problem is there are cool projects, and they have tokens, yet I have no desire to own the token, because I don't think it will go up.

IMO the current fungible token market is dominated by trader capital (high time preference) and not investor capital (low time preference). Botto reminds me of something like Terraforms, where I am very bullish on their cultural relevance on high time frames, but not sold that the trader capital will care about it in the near term (kinda too nerdy, complex, etc.).  I think you basically need the market structure to change  for the market to catch up to what this sort of project's true value should be

Totally. 

Very revealing of the gap between ideals and reality

“Too cool to buy”