> In short, adding a decentralized network of paid/incentivized actors to any existing potential cryptographic problem space (a fair rough summary of the smart contract notion?), in particular the subset relevant for most businesses, doesn't seem to solve anything particularly well and typically decreases critical measures of engineering elegance such as simplicity, comprehensibility, predictability, etc. while increasing negative measures such as technical lock-in to piles of rapidly evolving technologies for which hiring and building is expensive and error-prone.
You could say very much the same thing about most supply-side innovations when they came out. Why buy a factory machine when your workers do it just fine? It's complicated, error-prone, you'll have to hire expensive, specialized mechanics to deal with it when it breaks down. It decreases measures of engineering elegance, like simplicity, comprehensibility and predictability. All the locking you into that vendor with a massive upfront capital cost.
Smart contracts eliminate trusted third parties (sometimes) and automate certain processes that previously couldn't be automated due to trust issues, or were automated but centralized (with the aggregating entity extracting rents). Fixing these things will reduce transaction costs globally, just as factory automation did.
Will it solve everything? No, at least not soon. Will it eliminate lawyers, courts, and so on? Not even close. But it will do some things. Things like escrow, notarization, and assurance contracts (e.g. kickstarter) are all easily amenable to blockchain / smart contract solutions. Prediction markets are another good one.
My point is basically this: People have been making unbelievably grandiose claims about cryptocurrencies. And those claims are, largely, bullshit. However, there are some things that they do very well, and they are starting to do them.