I'm also very hooked with the first too. I'm also interested in storage sharing economy ones, like maidsafe, sia and storjx, but i didn't investigate much into it.
Regarding ripple, I have many question marks. First of all because it's a closed source project. How could I run a node I don't know what's inside?
Second of all, many banks are contributing to the project. On one side it's an adnvantage, but on the other side could I trust it, when blockchain is supposed to disrupt financial sector as we know it?
That boggles me too but i still find it as a great coin to invest but after a lot of research