and even bitcoin is so poorly integrated into existing financial infrastructure it's not an immediately tractable concept and until it is...I'd rather not hedge my bank account into something that may very well end of catastrophic failure

Of course investing in new technology is always risky.

Altcoins really have been underwhelming as a whole since bitcoin

I haven't heard of any altcoin besides Ethereum that provides a significant benefit over Bitcoin, so it's natural that other altcoins don't lead anywhere.

edit: btw, Augur specifically is a fork of ethereum.

I haven't read anything about Augur wanting to fork ethereum. Where did you get that idea? The FAQ says that Augur wants to run on Ethereum (https://augur.zendesk.com/hc/en-us)

From Augur's perspective I don't think it makes much sense to fork Ethereum. There's more security against attacks without forking. Augur also profits from having Ether as the core currency that's payed inside the network and not have a separate currency for that.

imagine being able to easily alchemise a more useful prettier version of gold, then sell it for less than gold initially

None of the direct Bitcoin forks are more useful than Bitcoin because of network effects. The same is true for Ethereum. Ethereum is better than Bitcoin because it allows applications like Augur to run on it. It's more difficult to legally attack Augur when it runs on Ethereum instead of it's own network.

If you are a company renting out lookers than it useful to have the payment for the lockers to be in Ether instead of your own currency XEther because Ether is a currency for which other applications exist.

Sooner or later there will be a SilkRoad type service on Ethereum. In contrast to a lot of BitCoin markets, the market owner won't be able to run away with the money in that market.

Consider for example the case of anoncoin planning to fork into zerocash - zero cash will entirely dominate anoncoin in theory so all those people who hold anoncoin can basically kiss their holdings goodbye thanks to their developers defecting to the new technology.

I don't see a huge market for those currencies. If trades happen in a Ethereum based markets it's quite easy to provide a trustworthy mixer where the trust is based on Ethereum escrow that internally uses zerocash.

edit:

There no good reason to edit instead of writing a new post to continue the conversation.