I would like to suggest some thoughts:

Ethereum has a serious first-mover advantage and has been gaining huge traction with the number of developers launching ICOs for projects to build on the platform, as well as major corporate and institutional players in the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance

Each time I read on Ethereum network effect or Ethereum first mover advantage, I keep reminding myself that Ethereum is an experiment. A very interesting one in fact, but let's face it, it's built on top of obsolete blockchain components (e.g. consensus, fee model). Ethereum is stuck with a community of developers using the network mostly for ICOS and other developing interesting projects, but unable to go in production due to scaling and governance issues. If Vitalik was free to create a new smart contract platform today, I am sure it would be very different from the actual Ethereum. Instead of using his genius to address a running experiment upgrade constraints, he would be free to build new solutions taking advantage of recent advances in the many aspects of blockchain architecture.

Bitshares and Steem and probably the best performing of any blockchains existing, yet have failed to grow traction to even come close to paralleling the adoption rate of Ethereum and Bitcoin

Vitalik recently said that more than 90% of the actual projects listed on CMC will not make it in the coming years. I would add that many of these are currently listed in the 25 top positions. So I think that adoption rate and traction are not good indicators to detect who will be there at the end of 2018. The actual market is dominated by speculators and traders, and I suspect that they are in the space to make money with their old-school capitalistic cultural mindset. I don't judge them, but I don't consider them as blockchain communities. Their evaluation of a good project is very different from mine. Blockchain is a backend technology. I would'nt rely on them for recommandations.

Of course, this is a hypothetical situation, and Ehtereum could scale in time to meet the needs of its institutional partners in the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance and hundreds/thousands of ICO projects and developers

This is where I totally disagree. The Ethereum Alliance, in my view, is a list of centralized entities putting a lot of pressure on Ethereum's governance and roadmap. ICO developers, on the other side, just use the platform to raise money for their own projects. Did I forgot mining pools? Not my kind of community.

My point is, scaling or not, the actual Ethereum project is probably far from the original views of Vitalik. He is now tied by very powerful and demanding centralized forces.

If truly decentralized and scalable projects like Bitshares, Steem and EOS are not recognized for what they really are - the next economy foundation - this shall NOT be an exciting ride for me.