I agree with you about the importance of the social and economic ramifications - after all, that's the main idea behind a lot of cryptocurrencies, conceptually. I guess you might be right though that this isn't obvious or some perhaps not think of it as an important objective.
I'm not sure about the trap though - or maybe I think of it differently - because what you're describing I associate only with some form of business bastardization of the idea where people are led to believe false things without ever actually grasping the underlying concepts. In which case, sure, there's your postgres or your web panel or whatever. But if you know any better you'll realize that if you *can* build something without requiring blockchain or other such systems then you're simply doing something else entirely and it might be completely unrelated. The whole point is that you can't just host an application with Postgres backend or create anything that is more efficient or "technically superior" (not easily, anyway) without compromising the uncompromisable which is some crucial property of the system, eg. decentralization, permisionlessness. I can easily conjure up "better" solutions to an infinite pool of problems if I can simply reject the requirements.