Great parallel with the CeFi (banks), Achim!
The difference between ICOs and Defi is that Defi is not 'initial'. It's ongoing and something is already built. If it's sustainable, it will keep working, otherwise it won't. Defi has untapped potential, but also a lot of craze around it, which often makes people take greater risks than their situation allows them to.
In that sense, while the learning curve is still so steep and regular people don't better understand what it's all about and how to participate and the level of risk associated with each of their decisions, maybe it's ok the access is kinda restricted to people with higher budgets because of the huge fees.
I totally agree with you. ICOs was mainly selling wind to naive people whereas there is real technology behind Defi. As you said a lot of this Defi is still in very early stages and it is therefore quite risky. Smartcontracts is nothing else than code and if the code has weeknesses it can be quite problematic. When ETH prices dropped in april, people on Maker DAO lost everything because there was a bug somewhere.
Thanks a lot for your comment!