In tech developments it is often the case that you do not end up building what you set out to. The ETH team set out to build a functioning smart contract platform that would disrupt, among other things, the current financial industry. When judging the success of ETH allowances have to be made for the fact that the ETH project is still a work in progress and that scaling solutions are in the road map and have not yet been deployed. However even if ETH fails as a smart contract platform there is no doubt that ETH has very successfully disrupted the capital markets via the ERC20 token ecosystem.