Can you expand on "easier" and "faster" in easier/faster/better. I understand "better" in terms of transparency, shared standards for integration, and various other properties.
I can less immediately expand "easier" and "faster".
Easier: on chain VMs are far from simple or easy, recovery from mistakes is far more complex. Some other aspects such as the implicit common standard might reduce some amount of need for "green field agreement", and the implicit openness of the protocols avoid some of the traps of "here's a rest api, go", but is this the focus? When you look at a wide variety of the big ticket items in everything that needs doing, is the total set easier? Are there surprises there?
Faster: similar to above, this claim is surprising. There's a lot of by-design overhead to a cryptographic ledger system. Lots of things that can be done to make it wider, to reduce latency and increase throughput, but at a fundamental level core operations such as transaction creation require a lot more processing going into a ledger than into a traditional database, even one at scale. Maybe faster here isn't about system faster, but time to product delivery? If so is that common standards? Are there surprises here too, what were they?
Edit: I see elsewhere in the thread you provide some answers in a slightly different framing. A potentially unfair paraphrase and summary seems to be that this enabled integrations to bypass expensive incumbents and comparatively poor traditional infrastructure. If that's a reasonable approximation my question is this: what if you dropped good sized chunks of the blockchain part that is the main system bottleneck, but kept the rest of the properties (shared micro computation model, shared transaction model, common API standard and protocol, eradication of foot dragging incumbents etc).?