I'm not so sure about this. I don't have a college degree, but I don't think the issue with crypto/defi/web3 is a lack of understanding of distributed systems or cryptography. I'd say they're doing alright in the purely technical aspects, although I'm nowhere near an expert.
Rather, I think the fault lies in their understanding of economic and societal concepts: money, debt, what it means to own something. I think that their vision of the future, where every human interaction is mediated by a pseudo-economy, is fundamentally flawed, and that trust is a societal issue which cannot be solved by technology alone.
You need a reasonably good understanding of the technology to know what it does, what it cannot do, and most importantly, where it's useless.
Even if you know very little about the business domain and all its social/societal/political aspects (and I perfectly agree, most of these problems don't have technical solutions) the space is filled with charlatans who don't even understand what a blockchain is.
You'll see plenty of people pushing blockchains where they literally want a centralized DB with a PKI, since they don't need (and don't want) a trustless permissionless system.
You also see blockchains pushed in situations where the weakest link is the human interface that inputs data. Yet the oracle problem gets swept under the rug.
Finally you see vaporware projects that go against 40+ years of research in distributed consensus.
I need to give credit to Bitcoin maximalists, some of them are very vocal about the non-sensical blockchain solutionism.
Rather, I think the fault lies in their understanding of economic and societal concepts: money, debt, what it means to own something. I think that their vision of the future, where every human interaction is mediated by a pseudo-economy, is fundamentally flawed, and that trust is a societal issue which cannot be solved by technology alone.