Some people genuinely believed poorlymarket represented the future of finance—is this some kind of elaborate joke, or are we all missing something obvious here?

If you actually want to see real gains, you need to be looking at fundamentally different projects. Ones that actually solve problems instead of just riding hype cycles. The market's littered with these kinds of experiments, and most of them fade into obscurity pretty quickly. Worth remembering before throwing capital at the next thing everyone's hyped about.