"The Contract is the Code, and the Code is the Contract."
It was a programmers no-man's land where anyone could stake a claim, and start doing cool stuff. And if you screwed up, it was your fault. Nobody else's. And you had to watch out, because it was easy to lose money into nothingness (yeah, BTC had checksums, Eth didnt - another point of amateur hour).
Until the DAO.
When that happened, I think $150m of Eth went into it. Massive amounts. The idea was to have a distributed living self-autonomous company. And, by the older ideals, lots of someones didn't do their homework. Or they did and it was intentional. Regardless, the "completely innocent magnanimous leaders of Ethereum" decided to force a Blockchain split, and rewind it all. Of course, Something like 2/3's of the total amount was owned by Ethdevs. Surprised? Nope.
Bitcoin? Sure, I'll play. But Ethereum has proved that if you are in the special class of people (Creators with loads of money lost), you don't matter. Nor do the ideas of what they were supposedly founded with.