As long as there are no projects that the community wants to fund, these funds can be made to work without spending them. The Steem DAO could be something like the central bank of Steem, performing the function of smoothing out sharp price spikes. Perhaps it would be possible to develop some mechanism so that at the expense of Steem DAO resources you can get significant delegations for your projects or something like that. There are many options.

When this DAO functionality was added it would have been better if some new "special" addresses like @null were added to the chain so funds could be directed to perform a variety of high level actions, such as sending them to the reward pool, auto-buying Steem off the internal market, etc. Some of those could be approximated by bots but you'd have to trust the account managing the bot.