To be clear, I agree that the broadness and simplicity of ERC721 is what led to its success.

My point is that "success" (in the sense of "a lot of people making NFTs" or "a lot of people investing in NFTs") is a bad measure for things that "Web3 society" should care about, because the whole thing happening with NFTs right now is a speculative market run by people who want to make money first, second, and N≤1000th; and to package art they would have made anyway for long-term secondary-market appreciation, roughly dead-last.

(And even if they did want that, they don't know how; the whole ecosystem is geared toward splitting technological competence out of the equation into fly-by-night professional-services firms and their productized "NFT as a Service" offerings, leaving the decision-making for choosing those firms in the hands of independent artists/musicians/etc — i.e. people who have no idea what considerations are at play for things like fault-tolerant distribution of digital media. Or in the hands of businesspeople who recruit and exploit such independent artists en-masse, with eyes only on short-term profitability of their NFT collection offerings, and no thought toward long-term asset valuation even ten years down the line.)

Insofar as the people building Web3 — and Ethereum specifically — can be said to share a set of ideals about decentralization, immutability, permanency, etc., the kind of people who have come in to create NFTs are operating explicitly against these ideals (see also: the fact that NFT asset URIs — and NFT metadata generally — is updatable; the artist/their publisher can come along and decide they want to replace your monkey with a "better-drawn" one after you've bought it!)

IMHO a non-fungible asset standard that was actually written and used to the same ideological purpose that Ethereum itself was created and operated, would look far different.

It's just that "the ideological purpose for which Ethereum itself was created"... isn't a very common thing for artists or business-people to care about; and so that kind of NFT wouldn't have any speculative market behind it. So nobody would even know it exists. Except maybe digital conservationists, and the rare kind of private collectors who want to engage explicitly with digital conservationists. The sorts of people who would consider purchasing something from the Smithsonian's private archives.

---

Also, re: oracles, I can see why "get an oracle to do X" is onerous; my own personal stance has always been that there should be functionality built into Ethereum-alike nodes enabling every node to be its own web2 + web3 oracle; in two primary senses:

- "declare your intent to request an arbitrary web2 URL; actually request it; and embed the request+result together into a tx, where your key then asserts provenance on the fetch" being a core RPC method you can expect to exist on any node for any Eth-like blockchain

- "fetch an asset by URN from a permanent storage network into memory" being an EVM opcode — the permanency means it's deterministic, so why not, eh? Though, such an opcode would actually be terminal — would interrupt current TX execution and instead queue a thunk into a state-trie scheduling queue, to be evaluated when the runtime finishes the blocking IO for the tx. (Like how Microsoft Orleans does blocking-yields on distributed actors. See also, the way Elrond's cross-shard transactions work: https://docs.elrond.com/technology/cross-shard-transactions/.)

Of course, none of this exists today, let alone did it exist in November of 2017 when the first ERC721 token was minted. :)