I'll bite. what makes ADA relevant at all?
Cardano/ADA is relevant because it is viewed as a potential "Ethereum Killer". It's main features are: the creator, Charles Hoskinson, was a co-founder of Ethereum (he only worked on the mechanics of the governance system. Vitalik and Gavin Woods were the true technical folks), it will solve the scalability issues facing Ethereum right now, and they have a peer review process for their whitepapers and code.
The whole peer review thing is a bit overblown, imo, but for the common layman it seems like a big thing. Any good project has their algorithms and designs and implementation peer reviewed to some degree. While this is all great and dandy, any developer that has a decent amount of experience in the industry knows that you can design everything, in your mind, perfectly but when it is put into production and at scale, you always run into unanticipated challenges that can ruin your careful design. There should be a balance between careful upfront design and production testing. There is a reason why the waterfall methodology failed miserably in software. Because of their approach, they are are smart contract blockchain that has existed for almost 5 years with no smart contract ability. Cardano is supposed to have smart contracts working sometime in the summer or fall, but, imo, they are missing a big opportunity to take advantage of Ethereum's current situation and their delays in the development of 2.0 to attract other projects into their ecosystem.
Full disclosure: I have a small stack of ADA bought about a year ago so, while I think it still has something to potentially offer, I think there are other eth-alternative projects that are in better position to capitalize on the current situation.
